from the i-hate-network-address-translation dept.
I just received an email from Dyn.com, explaining that their free hostname program will be ending in 30 days. An excerpt from the email:
For the last 15 years, all of us at Dyn have taken pride in offering you and millions of others a free version of our Dynamic DNS Pro product. What was originally a product built for a small group of users has blossomed into an exciting technology used around the world.
That is why with mixed emotions we are notifying you that in 30 days, we will be ending our free hostname program. This change in the business will allow us to invest in our customer support teams, Internet infrastructure, and platform security so that we can continue to strive to deliver an exceptional customer experience for our paying customers.
Any users of their free service considering an upgrade to the paid VIP account? If not, will you migrate to another free dynamic DNS service?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gringer on Tuesday April 08 2014, @07:30AM
So, they're doing this because they want to remove abusive and trust-violating users from their pool of customers. I can understand that, but the cost justification seems a bit odd. The unfortunate side effect of such an action will be paying customers who leave due to this action, as well as the removal of trustworthy and publicity-spreading free customers. Offering discounted rates for people who have previously paid nothing is probably not going to offset those losses. Time to prepare for the "new era" of a downward spiral of income.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by elf on Tuesday April 08 2014, @08:19AM
Why so negative? Do you expect everyone to give you something for free?
I can only see this as a good thing, if I was a paid customer I would be looking forward to a better service because there were less people using the service but the same levels of investment given to customer support.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:49AM
Nothing negative about reality friend and when you get customers used to paying little to nothing and then jack the price, especially when there is competition that offers similar service for your old price? Well you can be sure to kiss a large percentage of those former customers goodbye.
As an example for over a decade a browser cost you real money, with many in the $10-$20 range when that could actually buy something. Now imagine if say Google decided to start charging say $9.99 a year to have Chrome....how many of those Chrome users do you think would stay on Chrome, and how many would go to other browsers? I would say Google would be damned lucky to retain even 10% of their customers in that case.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @12:50PM
I don't know where you read that from. The OP claims (rightly or wrongly) that ending the free service (which is something completely different from not offering it in the first place) will ultimately harm dyn.com.
Note that the free service will be used by many people who would never have considered using a paid service, and which will therefore leave (especially given that there are still other services which offer free dynamic DNS services).
There are several paths how closing a free service may harm the paid offerings:
What you must not forget in all this is that as much as you would like to think it is, a decision for or against a certain service is almost never a purely rational one. And it's exactly those non-rational parts that may ultimately make the difference between a successful and a failed business.
Note that I'm not in a position to judge whether the effects mentioned above are sufficiently strong that they may indeed harm dyn.com. But they are certainly real effects, and have to be taken into account when judging the decision. I'd expect that at dyn.com they did consider it and decided that the losses are less than the cost of continuing the free service.
(Score: 2, Funny) by GeminiDomino on Tuesday April 08 2014, @10:08PM
Users of the free service likely will effectively do mouth-to-mouth marketing for the company (the most effective, but also the hardest to measure type of marketing).
I really hope you mean "word of mouth," otherwise that's going to be hell to explain to Dr. Girlfriend...
"Really, sweetheart! I was just asking him about Dynamic DNS!"
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 1) by tnt118 on Tuesday April 08 2014, @03:24PM
I've used the free service for a number of years. I'm not entirely sure what other things they offer for paying customers, but it seems everything they do is lightweight enough that it is difficult for me to believe the free users of the service really are detrimental to the performance of their paid services. As far as I know service has never been interrupted while I've been using it.
What sort of bugs me the most is dyndns is the only service built into my router, and while I know there are some other places I can look, I do feel like it's going to be more hassle than it is worth. If they offered a lower tier, something like 8-10 dollars a year for just 1-2 names, I'd be significantly more inclined to be a paying customer.
I think I like it here.
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Tuesday April 08 2014, @11:08AM
Seems possible Dyn hired a Whorton MBA who crunched numbers and told them they can dump the chattel and still make money. These form letters are such tripe, hiding the true meaning in flowery words and vapid concern. Since their going to piss people off anyway, how about saying:
Hey freeloaders, we're just tired of supporting you and we've been told we can make much more money by getting rid of you and serving our paying customers. Good luck and thanks for all the business you drove to us, we don't owe you anything.
I mean, if this was such a wonderful experience, why change it? Also, if support was such an issue then just charge free accounts for support, might make more money that way.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday April 08 2014, @01:41PM
I don't believe that for a second... They've been routinely adding more restrictions to free users, which don't have anything to do with abuse or trust. Dropping the per-account DNS limit to one single name... Requiring every user manually sign-in to their account every 30 days... etc. That all reeks of just trying to upsell free users, or else hassle them enough that they choose to leave.
They've also used the possibility of domain seizure as an excuse... It seems the simple solution to that would be to migrate free users onto a single, new domain, which doesn't have any paying customers on it. Free users can't expect anything more than "best effort", and paying customers would be unaffected.
This is just another company, which got profitable through the goodwill of the community, departing from their roots in order to make more profit.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 08 2014, @05:07PM
I haven't seen anybody figure this out yet. Call it my cynicism but...
TZO was acquired by DynDns.
The vast majority of home routers either support TZO or DynDns. Some support a third option, but I don't know how many
The vast majority of home routers receive a firmware upgrade approximately freakin never. You could wait a few years.
DynDns has been fucking up for years. They have not been a reliable service and I flat out stopped using them about 6 months ago when I had a half a dozen incidents in the year before that where the routers were not able to update the records and services/VPNs failed for my clients.
I wasn't the only one. More than a couple of people have told me they had issues similar in which DynDns services failed on them. Here's the real kicker... we were all PAID accounts!!
They have made it abundantly clear that they are a piss-poor company run by corporate idiots, and either suffered from major brain drain with their primary talent leaving and/or are being run by greedy stupid people trying to pump up the user base before they cash out somehow. I'm willing to bet every donut I will ever eat that DynDns is taking advantage of their market position to force an upsell to paid services in what may be a captive audience.
Not everyone is capable enough of putting OpenWRT on their router. As somebody that owns a Sonicwall I sure as hell can't. Although, if you own a Sonicwall I guess it's assumed you can afford a static IP.
All the more reason to push even harder towards IPv6 where we can afford to start handing out static IP address blocks like candy again.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday April 08 2014, @10:25PM
You're assuming you have to run the DNS update client on your router... You do not.
Your router doesn't run any useful services, for which you'd need your hostname updated. So, you're going to have some other REAL computer up and running, anyhow, and that computer can run the DNS update client.
The only added complexity is checking your IP address. ddclient supports logging-in to several popular brands of router to fetch your IP, but the simple and generic option is to just periodically connect to a web server which reports your IP. eg.
ddclient -use=web -web http://myip.dnsdynamic.org/ [dnsdynamic.org]
Actually, instead of me typing-up the details, just refer to their config file example:
http://dnsdynamic.org/api.php [dnsdynamic.org]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 08 2014, @11:01PM
Thanks for the info. Very helpful.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Bartman12345 on Tuesday April 08 2014, @07:58AM
My free account ran out quite some time ago, and I reluctantly stumped up for a premium account. I remotely support quite a few computers, and the client software running on all those machines is set to talk back to my dyndns address, so it was mostly about avoiding the inconvenience of updating all those machines.
I didn't feel too bad about it though, the price is cheap and the service works well. Also, pretty much every router supports it out if the box.
(Score: 1) by Drew617 on Tuesday April 08 2014, @02:39PM
I'm in a similar situation with Dyn as I was with LMI: I've used the free products extensively where appropriate, and through my own company and referrals to others have pumped real money (REAL money in the case of LMI) into each solution.
In each case, the products were very good, among the most polished in their market. It's not that I don't have the $10 or whatever, it's that the free/non-comm licenses had been a part of their product matrix for years. Lots of people had come to count on them, or made decisions with that in mind. It's lousy business, and once mistreated by a company I tend to believe that it'll happen again.
So, screw you guys, I'll migrate to another product. When the commercial contracts are up, we'll move those too. Judging by recent LMI performance, I may be in the minority.
FWIW, it was easy to see this coming at Dyn. Their free product has been progressively more hidden over the course of a few years.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @08:10AM
Their paid product, now called 'Remote Access' (formerly 'DynDNS Pro'), is $25 per year for up to 30 subdomains. Here's their list of domains [dyn.com]
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by WizardFusion on Tuesday April 08 2014, @08:44AM
I started using OpenDNS to move away from the Google DNS servers, but I don't like the way they hijack missing sites.
I am sure there is a setting somewhere, I just haven't found it.
I was looking for a service that I can use to block all advertisers at the DNS lookup end, rather than rely on updating hosts entries on PCs, as it's difficult to do this on phones/tablets (not impossible, just difficult)
(Score: 1) by Remmy on Tuesday April 08 2014, @08:51AM
That's not really what this story is about though... but an interesting question none the less. I think it shouldn't be too hard to turn some sort of adblock list of hostnames into DNS zones that resolve to localhost or whatever.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:04AM
Ah yes, sorry. I miss read it due to still being asleep.
(Score: 3, Informative) by WizardFusion on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:20AM
Now that I have woken up a bit and checked my domains, I use noip.com
The free offering is enough for my needs
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday April 08 2014, @11:45AM
I use them as well. You do need to renew your name entry every 60 days to keep it, but it's not too much trouble. Seeing DynDNS's price for a year above actually might push me towards them though ... it's not a bad deal.
(Score: 1) by bogibear on Tuesday April 08 2014, @08:57PM
Actually, noip.com has to be registered every 30-days, not 60. But it's still no trouble. My Asus router will keep noip.com informed of any IP chnages.
I've used noip's free and paid services, and I found both to work and have never experienced an outage.
I assume the hardest thing about changing providers is that if you are using one of their domains (I use zapto.org from noip.com for a personal project), you would have to make a few changes. I've not tried noip.com to manage my personal domain.
The world's cumulative IQ is a constant. The population is growing.
(Score: 3, Informative) by GeminiDomino on Tuesday April 08 2014, @12:18PM
(Offtopic, but parent might find it useful anyway. I'll take the hit)
Just get an old box,throw $FAVORITE_LINUXORBSD_FLAVOR on it, and install Bind 9. Configure it as a forwarding DNS server to whoever you want to use (google, openDNS, w/e) and have your DHCP server report it as the DNS server for clients. Then you can add a dummy zone file that resolves * to 127.0.0.X, and whenever you want to block a domain, you just point it at that zone file.
It's even easier to set up than I'm making it sound, and it has the added bonus of working on whatever machines visitors to your network may bring with them.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday April 08 2014, @02:01PM
Thanks, I'll give it a go.
(Score: 3, Funny) by egcagrac0 on Tuesday April 08 2014, @03:16PM
We did this at an office I used to work with.
It's amazing how much productivity spiked once *.youtube.com and *.hulu.com resolved to 127.0.0.1 .
Don't forget to block tynt.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Jaruzel on Tuesday April 08 2014, @08:59AM
I used to use TZO.NET for my Dynamic DNS needs and paid a few dollars a year for it as well, so I wasn't a freetard. About a year ago TZO sold up to Dyn, who took on all the TZO.NET users. This also included migrating their accounts into the Dyn Admin Portal.
Now, when my TZO account came up for renewal Dyn just simply deleted all my info and removed my sub-domain. My account was still there, just with no services associated to it. I didn't get an email to tell me this was happening - the first I knew about it was that my DNS entry just disappeared causing email not to arrive (I had it as my MX alias for other domains).
When I tried to re-activate my sub-domain via their portal, they only option they would let me have was the DynDNS Pro paid-for option, which I refused to do based on their actions.
So in short. DynDNS are not to be trusted with your money or your sub-domains.
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday April 08 2014, @09:13AM
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Tuesday April 08 2014, @10:00AM
I do some free support for friends (who here doesn't?) and it's been easy when I can access their computers remotely by punching a port 22 hole in their firewall and give them a DYNDNS name.
Been doing this for several years. About a year ago I got tired of the monthly nagging email and bought their longest plan. I think it was three years, or something like that.
It was chump change compared to the time it's saved me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @10:27AM
Used to use their free service.
But about a year ago they started a "renew your free account every month" plan to try to beg folks into upgrading to a paid plan.
A few months back I got tired of the nag-mail, and finally got around to setting up my own, local, dyn-dns for the friends machine that I admin (and that I'd been using dyn-dns to assign a name to).
So, identical service from my perspective (machine with dynamic IP has hostname now), but now I no longer rely on a third party for the service.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tomtomtom on Tuesday April 08 2014, @10:30AM
I used to use them when it was a free service. However I decided to move away when they started requiring you to sign in every 30 days to keep the free accounts alive. I ended up just hosting my own dynamic DNS on my own domain instead. It's pretty easy to do, you just need to get a VPS-type setup which has its own static IP and can run BIND (I guess you could even do it with a free AWS instance but I'm sure many of the low-end LXC-based hosts will work too). It's also worth using a decent registrar who will make it easy for you run your own DNS server with theirs as secondary for the domain - I like Gandi.net [gandi.net] as they are also DNSSEC friendly and seem to be pretty competently run. Namecheap are also apparently easy to use for this setup although their DNSSEC support isn't there yet from what I understand.
All in all it could be done for less than Dyn's new "pro" account costs, especially if you are already paying for a domain and/or hosting somewhere in which case the only cost is probably the time invested to set it up.
It's worth noting that BIND is a pain to set up if you want to do dynamic DNS in a DNSSEC domain though. Here [blogspot.co.uk] is one page that gives an explanation of how to configure this setup (and here [dragonsreach.it] are some good instructions on how to set up DNSSEC more generally with it).
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Tuesday April 08 2014, @11:05AM
I totally second Gandi.net - I have more than dozen domains with them, half of which were transferred from less competent registrars. Gandi have proven themselves to be efficient and easy to use.
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2, Informative) by big_e on Tuesday April 08 2014, @11:08AM
For $25/year I can just as easily buy my own custom domain name and use the registrar's own included DNS hosting to point to my IP address. Namecheap and Enom both support address records that can be changed dynamically via scripting. My IP changes so rarely I can simply do it manually. I purchased my own domain name ever since dyn started making me log in every 30 days in attempt to upsell me for their overpriced dyndns pro service a few years ago.
If dyn charged a more reasonable price like $10/yr which is more in line of what I would expect considering their customers are simply piggybacking on of dyn's existing domain names, I would have become their paying customer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by dbot on Tuesday April 08 2014, @12:45PM
I'd been a paid member of dyn.com since at least 2006. I recently switched all my paid services to easydns.com because:
- I don't get promotional email from their marketing "Ninjas"
- My billing doesn't mysteriously switch to auto-renew each year
"You are receiving this email message because at one time you utilized a DynDNS product or service and provided us with your email address. We want to stay in touch more so click here."
Okay, goodbye.
(Score: 2, Informative) by LukeSkywalker on Tuesday April 08 2014, @06:34PM
I have been using EasyDNS for 6 or 7 years and I have had no problems with them at all. A couple of times I had to call them for small issues and they were very helpful on the phone, they didn't treat me like I was an idiot and provided me with the info I needed so it was resolved quickly. Basic domain registration and DNS is $15 yr CAD, the next level up is $35 CAD and adds things like backup mail servers, 3 mail boxes and DNSSEC etc.
I have no affiliation with EasyDNS, they are just one of the few companies that I am happy with the services they provide.
(Score: 2, Informative) by kbahey on Tuesday April 08 2014, @01:41PM
If you have a Linode VPS, then you do have free Dynamic DNS. All you need is a script to update the relevant subdomain.
Here is a script that does it for an OpenWRT router.
Using Linode Dynamic DNS with OpenWRT [baheyeldin.com]
If you don't use OpenWRT, you can still use any Linux box behind the subdomain, but you need to modify the above script to get the external IP from outside your network. This can be done by a small "what is my IP" script. For example, simple script like so will do the trick:
Place the PHP script on your Linode VPS somewhere, e.g. ip.php, and have the other script call it.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 2) by Dale on Tuesday April 08 2014, @02:31PM
I switched from a free account (5+ years) to paid a couple of years ago. I got a good deal and am paid through mid-2018. I have their updater program that runs and keeps the IP updated as needed. I am not sure what I'll do when the account expires in 2018 though. My IP rarely changes anymore and as infrequently as it does I can manually update it. For the few things I'm using I could just as well use the IP directly at this point. I am not sure I'd pay $25 per year for it.
I've really enjoyed their stuff for years. I would never have been a paid customer without having used their free services before that. I hope this change doesn't cost them in the long term.
(Score: 1) by lajos on Tuesday April 08 2014, @04:29PM
I just added an A record for my home machine and will update it once every two years when my assigned ip changes. And as a bonus it's on my domain name.
Their login once policy for free service was annoying, but I could live with it. But 20 bucks a year for an A record on a crappy dyndns domain is too much.
Oh, and while we are on the subject, fuck every other "cloud" service. They either go under, or go paid eventually.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @05:33PM
It seems the vast majority are based on Bind, but I was wondering if there were something a little simpler and hand-holdier.
The GnuDIP system seems like it might be ideal:
http://gnudip2.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
MintDNS is "mostly" open source but seems more commercially oriented:
http://www.dyndnsservices.com/ [dyndnsservices.com]
Two Bind Based Recipes:
http://bahut.alma.ch/2013/01/personal-dynamic-dns. html [bahut.alma.ch]
http://andrwe.org/linux/own-ddns [andrwe.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @06:07PM
Or maybe not so ideal? It seems the binaries haven't been updated since 2002.
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Tuesday April 08 2014, @05:56PM
I started a long while back using DYN free... then they added a requirement to login every 90 days... I went with DYN's then $10 a year plan. Over time the cost rose but the number of addresses I was hosting with them was the same-- one domain host and I could not use my own domain. When they decided to jump from $15 a year to $25 dollars a year [with similar jackass marketing wheeze as noted above] I found a different ddns provider.
I use Algenta's ThatIP Dynamic DNS [thatip.com]. Not fancy and allows 10 DNS records for $10 a year but I can use my own domain. I've used them for a couple of years... My only complaint is their DDNS client for windows has a memory leak and if left turned on will slowly capture all available memory.
(Score: 1) by Konomi on Wednesday April 09 2014, @02:06AM
Dyndns has been harassing free users for ages to get off, I got out ages ago and switched services. They'd send you confirm emails even when you'd made dns updates so you would always be answering your email to keep your service up. This has just been the last step in many steps Dyndns has used to get rid of it's free users. Just find another service the dirty methods they used to get rid of their free users makes me never want to see them again.