I’ve fielded a handful of queries from members about the coming DNS usage quotas. Some have looked at the “query usage” links beside their domain names and are surprised at the numbers they are seeing.
One thing to be aware of is that we’ve discovered that the January numbers were tabulated incorrectly and are too high. To gain a truer insight into your usage, look at the January 28th figure. We are currently running a process to fix up the stats to reflect actual usage and expect to have those online within the next couple of days.
But I’d like to take an opportunity to convey the following principles behind this to our member base:
The quota levels are subject to revision, and they may be revised in favour of our members. We are not out to screw our customers, nor do we want to penalize people for running successful websites. So yesterday I mentioned 5 million queries per month for DNS-pro users. If we look at it and it turns out that too many users get caught above that 5M query ceiling who are not serious commercial entities with commensurate revenues, we will raise the ceiling to get as many of those users included into DNS-Pro as possible.
The other thing to be aware of is the way we’ll be tabulating monthly usage: We’ll basically be taking the top 5-days of usage every month and replacing them with the average of the remaining days. So if you get slashdotted or pushed up the front page of digg, you aren’t going to be hosed for it with a DNS bill.
For cases where you are using a lot of DNS queries, above that DNS-pro quota level, but you’re non-commercial or simply cannot afford to get slammed with a monthly DNS bill, then tell us your situation and we will see about working something out.
For the vast minority of domains, we’re talking domains that use tens of millions or hundreds of millions of queries per month (in one case a domain that has been known to hit 1 billion queries per day) – I’m sorry but we have to bring things back into reality. Getting that kind of usage on a DOS fortified, globally deployed anycast DNS network such as ours for $15 or $50 per year was nice while it lasted, but it’s basically costing us money to carry it.
The high-end commercial users should also be aware that we are adding a third 10-node anycast cluster which will be for use exclusively for enterprise and enterprise-lite domains.
Again, we will be reaching out to affected domains to outline options. I think everybody will find that we’ll be doing our utmost to be reasonable, not alienate our customers and we’ll be the most competitively priced carrier class DNS provider to be found.
webmaster says
The link to the up-coming quotas isn’t working at all. It gives me a 404.
Mark Jeftovic says
Woops, that is fixed now.