It was great to see so many posted overnight about the upcoming release of the Managed DNS service. Full details about the service will be provided when the service is released. There were several questions about pricing, secondary DNS and the target customer for this service.
As Peter posted earlier, the proposed wholesale price for the service is going to be in the USD$0.25 per month per zone range. This is for the full range of features in the release notes. We intend to offer secondary DNS services early in 2004 and this service will have an additional fee. As with other Tucows services, this is a wholesale offering. You may choose to resell it to your customers or use it for your own businesses. I have included more detailed answers to some of your questions below prepended with QUESTION>> Thanks for your interest in the service! Bruce Dorland Product Manager 1. BEN'S QUESTION: QUESTION>>In addition, I would like to know whether there are plans to offer a smart switching DNS based on service availability. For example, I would love a service that would periodically test my web servers for signs of life, and deliver a different response (i.e. IP of a secondary server) if the principal one were dead. I could then set up a short (e.g. 5 minute) TTL on the domain, etc. ANSWER>> That's something that isn't part of the service today, however you could accomplish this by implementing your own monitoring tool and simply submitting an API request to change the applicable zone record when the web server goes down. Again, all components of the service are available via API. 2. JIM'S QUESTIONS: -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Jim McAtee Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 5:52 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: DNS Questions Just received the announcement that Tucows will be offering their DNS service beginning in December and checked out the details at the RRC. QUESTION>>Is there a pricing page that I missed? ANSWER>> Pricing was not formally announced with the release, but as Peter E mentioned in a response to the same question, it will be in the $0.25/month/zone range. This pricing includes all features of the service including zone management, domain forwarding, under construction page and customizable domain for sale page. There are no upgrades to the service, you get it all. QUESTION>>How will the service be priced - do each of the little add-ons, such as the domain forwarding and "under construction" page each carry a monthly fee? ANSWER>> As I mention above, everything is included - no add on costs. QUESTION>>Does Tucows offer geographically diverse DNS servers? How many servers are there and where are they located? Is any kind of redundancy is employed - are they clustered, for instance? ANSWER>>The name servers are deployed at 2 separate locations in Toronto on different network backbones to provide failover. One of these locations is our main collocation facility that as a note was 100% available during the recent North American blackout. There is redundancy built into the system for both the name servers and the domain forwarding components. In terms of provisioning and the DNS application (that is used to manage the zone/domain forwarding info), the service leverages the redundancy built into the OpenSRS systems to ensure the DNS application and provisioning are both highly available. QUESTION>>Is there no secondary-only DNS offering? I know this was discussed previously. Overall, the DNS service seems like something being sold more to resellers than to end-users, so I'm surprised that secondary DNS wouldn't be offered. A service where Tucows' servers are authoritative, but pick up zone updates from a reseller's (stealth) DNS servers might also be attractive. ANSWER>> I assume by Secondary DNS, you mean in the instance where the customer will run their Primary DNS through a third party or themselves, but Tucows will run a Secondary/Slave of the Primary. The intent being, to offer customers who already have DNS systems in place, a secondary location for redundancy & availability of DNS services. A Secondary DNS Service is currently in the works and will likely be released in early 2004, although I don't have a final release date at this point. As a note (because it's already been mentioned), Secondary DNS will not be a free service and unfortunately I don't have any pricing information on this yet. ANSWER>>Also, the DNS service can be resold by Resellers to their end users or the Reseller may purchase the DNS services for themselves. ANSWER>>Regarding, your request for a service where Tucows' servers are authoritative, but pick up zone updates from a reseller's (stealth) DNS servers might also be attractive, this can be accomplished with our Secondary DNS Service when it is released. QUESTION>> Can multiple zones share common zone files, other than the one "default zone"? That is, can I point 100 domains(zones) at one set of records, 50 domains at another set, etc.? As a web host, we do this commonly, with one or two zone files per physical hosting web server. All domains share the same information and if an IP address changes, it means just updating one zone for all of the affected sites running on that server. If a customers has DNS needs beyond the basic web/ftp/email that we provide, we break them out into their own zone and maintain it as needed. ANSWER>> The ability for multiple zones to share a common zone information will be introduced as part of the next release of the Managed DNS Service. Similar to the Secondary DNS release, it will likely come in early Q1 2004, but I don't have a final date. QUESTION>> Can the zone files be edited directly, either by the reseller or by the customer? Or are the API and RWI based only on per-record transactions? ANSWER>> The zone information can be edited by the Reseller through the RWI or API and can be edited by the Reseller's customer through an implementation of the API/RCL or the Tucows hosted management interface. All zone modifications are updated on our name servers within 5 minutes of the entry being submitted. Also of note, the standard TTL for all zones is 5 minutes. I'm not 100% clear on your question about per-record transactions, but our API and interfaces allow for multiple-record operations (e.g., create, update, delete) in one API request. As a note, the bulk zone change functionality will allow you to perform multiple-record transactions.
