i talked to a guy at ultradns a couple days ago, and quite a few large adult programs are using them, i was amazed at the info about their system, looked through their control panel, and was pretty amazed at the overall product.

interesting

In my experience, they told me I would have 500,000 queries per month and would bill me $600 a month for that. So why not?

Then they showed my traffic increase 30% per month and then eventually 100% per month and they wanted to bill me over $5000 per month in a 2 year contract!!
After i shut them off in January, in Feb they said I had over 500,000 queries which how much traffic they originally said I would have when pointing all my traffic to them. Yet, I was sending them none!

Their tracking is faulty and even worse, they are in complete denial and have no interest in working with me on it. That is why I am on here venting because they don't want to discuss it with me.

Avoid them at all costs!

Dave Levine
SEXTOY.com

I thought all this BS is why god gave us dedicated servers.

I'd like to see the data on that. For one thing, it would be nearly impossible to collect, since DNS by definition is a distributed architecture and it would be nearly impossble to tell how many requests are dropped.

It is absolutely true that most ISPs have maybe one guy (if they are lucky) that really understands DNS. However, as I said, both Enom and ZoneEdit run very reliable, highly diverse DNS networks, with servers spread all over, and in the case of Enom, DNS is free, while ZoneEdit charges only a few bucks a year, depending on traffic. And anyone running DNS that knows what they're doing will never reboot multiple DNS servers at the same time, so the restart issue is pretty much nonexistent. Even if a restart is required, it takes only a few seconds at most. As for the security of BIND, it's not perfect, but it does run about 90% of DNS on the Net, and when the occasional exploit is found, because it's such a crucial app, patches are generally issued near instantly. But the bigger issue is below.

This sounds like the UltraDNS pitch, and it's only somewhat valid. If you have a highly trafficked site, the likelihood is that SOMEBODY on just about every dialup or broadband provider has accessed your site within the last 6-12 hours.

If so, your site's DNS info is ALREADY IN CACHE at the local ISP, and your DNS (or Ultra, if you use them) will never even get a DNS hit. Only if none of the subscribers to the broadband or dialup provider that Joe Pornviewer uses has recently requested DNS info will Jpe's provider even make a request. Otherwise, it gets pulled from the local ISP's DNS cache, without ever hitting your site DNS.

And, assuming that no one else from the European ISP where the request ir originating has requested to view the site, this will yield an increase in response time of maybe 50-100ms... for the very first request for that domain name made in a 12 hour period. Otherwise, no one else on that ISP will ever touch UltraDNS at all.

But even if it's 100ms faster, the actual response to the site itself is what really matters. All of the arguments about network latency and traffic delays to DNS apply even more so to HTTP traffic. So what happens if you get lightning fast DNS response and there's a logjam at one of the peering points? You lose the customer anyway, as they won't be able to see the site, even if they have the correct IP address to your server. So it's rather pointless.

Honestly, as an affiliate, I'd be far more concerned about the reliability of the network where the actual servers live than the DNS. If the argument is reliability, I'd much rather see the money spent with UltraDNS go toward a geographically diverse load balancing system, with servers in two different data centers so that if one has catastrophic problems, the other one can still handle traffic. Those sorts of problems are actually far more common -- a good DDOS attack can take an entire data center offline for hours -- and with servers spread among different data centers and proper failover routing and/or load balancing, the sites will still be live.

Totally reliable DNS won't mean much if the data center has issues, and that is where far, far more failures occur -- at the server, not at DNS.

good post!

Ultradns caters more to the corporate world where they buy stuff they dont need just because it exists.

this is true...:)

dont use them, will do in a couple of weeks!

Interesting post, I think you're artfully discounting all the valid reasons that I pointed out however.... if that one hit was a hit that would become a sale then it is indeed worth saving. Is a different of 100ms worth delivering? You bet, studies have been done indicating that consumers make up their mind about whether they "like" a site within the first 15 milliseconds... could be bullshit but hey.

Just to clarify, quickbuck not only uses ultradns but we *also* use a fat load balanced system with a 100% SLA global distributed caching network. The only thing we serve up is the dynamic pages.

Not trying to discount your points, or to say that your investment isn't justified as an additional bulletproofing of your affiliate program... I'm a strong believer in building the most robust infrastructure possible, but I also don't like to see people grossly overselling their product, and for the most part, that's what UltraDNS is doing in my opinion.

I congratulate you on being willing to spend the money to come up with the most robust solution possible for your affiliates and customers, because too many sponsors simply go for the lowest cost solution, and then wonder why they have retention problems or conversion problems... I just don't like to see people get hosed with technical mumbo-jumbo, and it feels like that's exactly what UltraDNS salespoeple are doing.

I'm just saying that buying geographically diverse DNS is probably unnecessary overkill, because the likelihood of actually missing a hit *because of DNS* is extremely remote, given that probably 95%+ of DNS hits for your site won't even *be* to your DNS, whether it's UltraDNS or your server's upstream ISP...

For example, if you are Pornsite B, and Joe Pornviewer clicks on pornsite A and pornsite B at the same time, and A happens to have been clicked on by Bill Pornviewer (who uses the same broadband provider) an hour ago, but for some reason, no one from that broadband provider has clicked on pornsite B in the last 6 hours, no matter *WHOSE* DNS you use, there will be a much longer delay in retrieving the correct DNS for pornsite B than pornsite A. Why? Because A is in the local ISP cache of the broadband provider, while B is not.

Regardless of who you use for DNS, Joe Pornviewer's local DNS, run by his broadband provider, is the first point of contact. The local DNS has to look and see if it has an entry in cache BEFORE it sends the request out to the authoritative DNS for that domain. The time to look it up in local cache isn't insignificant, and often takes FAR longer (100-300ms isn't uncommon, depending on cache size and DNS load) than the actual request and response from the authoritative DNS.

So in your scenario, if the difference in a join is in that 100-300ms difference in DNS response time, then Pornsite A is going to get the join, and he's probably using his ISP's free DNS. The only way to prevent that from happening and ensure a short response time would be to put a computer with an automated refresh of your site on the network of every major ISP worldwide, and ensure that it requests the IP address of your site from its local DNS more often than whatever the time-to-live setting is for your domain in DNS settings. Having a DNS node that is 5 ms away from the DNS used by the broadband provider won't make a whit of difference if your site isn't in cache for that provider... it will STILL take up to a couple hundred milliseconds for the cache lookup to fail, the broadband DNS to contract the root nameservers to find out what DNS is responsible for that domain, and then to contact UltraDNS and get a response.

I am guessing that most of the salespeople selling UltraDNS probably have no idea how DNS actually works, except at the most basic level. It's a complex beast with dozens of variables that affect caching time, refresh of mirror DNS, the order in which primary, secondary, and tertiary DNS are contacted, and so forth. I don't claim to be a DNS guru, but I know a little about it because I've had to troubleshoot DNS problems for customers that hosted with the ISP that I used to run, and I've unfortunately found that my knowledge of DNS is often more complete (as minimal as it is) than the techs responsible for maintaining DNS as many ISPs.

There's tons of redundancy inherently built into the Net's DNS structure, and the architecture was designed *specifically* to minimize DNS traffic and hits to the authoritative DNS (in this case UltraDNS), so the DNS system is not nearly as "unreliable" as UltraDNS would have you believe, unless your particular ISP is not following the applicable RFC when installing and running its DNS servers.

Promise???? They promise. You believe them?

Maybe they are useful if you have lots of little sites all over the world, and want to direct people to your closest node. But if you're in that market, you may as well use a CDN like Akamai. UltraDNS might be one of those solutions looking for a problem.

great post @ Gaybucks
Very useful.
Now it will be only a problem of how to get deleted from the "phone-list" :>

It does have the potential to increase your site traffic and additional benefits regarding security, network response time, international traffic, redundancy etc-if your interested in hearing more on DNS solutions ICQ me 428-946-566

It's incredibly easy to sell overhyped services with little overhead on a good network to people who have no clue how it works, but they have plenty of money to burn.

UltraDNS used to be in San Mateo, CA. They were in a little hole not far from an apartment of mine.. but, they were buzzword and enterprise compliant. (Costs a fortune to do uhh.. very roundabout ways of the same thing..)

As much as they're charging, you'd have a better bet using Akami.. at only another 50% or so of THAT cost.


Edit: To summarize: See GayBucks' thread at the top of the post. Technically, it's spot on, without being overly technical.

I use enom a lot. Overall I'd say it's quite reliable but their DNS DID have a rather lenghty outage just recently, several hours.

I used Powerdns' free service too and it was quick and reliable. It's not free anymore but cheap compared to UltranDNS

UltraDNS is cheap if you negoatiate the right pricing point-also you get a lot more. ICQ 428-946-566