DNS Usage Pricing: The final word.

Ok, we’ve done a lot of thinking about the DNS overage pricing, which is still forthcoming. So far we haven’t turned up billing on the heavy usage customers.

We’ve had a lot of great feedback, overall people are pretty understanding. After taking the feedback into account and looking at our customer usage patterns, we are actually going to back off the $99/month for up to 50 million queries per month idea. While that’s a great price for 50 million queries per month, it doesn’t do much good for the member doing 6 or 8 million queries per month.

After kicking around some ideas to accommodate those members I realized that we were just over-complicating things immensely. $99 divided by 50 million queries pencils out to about….

$2 / million queries

That’s the rate.

To recap what the landscape looks like now:

	DNS Hosting	DNS Pro	Enterprise Lite	Enterprise
Monthly Queries	1 million	5 million	5 – 100 million	100 million+
Price (easyDNS as Registrar)	$35 / year	$55 / year	$2/million queries $9.95/month minimum	$1.50 / million queries
Price (own registrar)	$20 / year	$40 / year	$2/million queries $9.95/month minimum	$1.50 / million queries

The overall feature set between packages is described here. The pricing sheet is here.

Finally, in terms of how we implement the query based billing, we are using the following parameters:

• The top 5 days usage every month will be discarded, and replaced with the average of the remaining days of the month (slashdot/digg/techcrunch protection)
• Before we issue a bill for overage (say you go over your 5 million queries on DNS Pro), we look at the previous month. If you did not exceed the quota the previous month, no additional charges will apply. Instead we’ll send a warning notice showing your usage and what kind of costs you would be looking at. So you only face overage charges if you exceed your quota 2 months running, at that point it looks like more than a spike. (The “Jasper Rule” – thanks to JVB for the idea)

I think this serves everybody’s interests. I can look at the customer usage and feel like everybody is getting value for where they are coming in in terms of usage, and I think this sort if implementation is fairly “shock-free”.

As always, feel free to call or email.

Mark Jeftovic

416-535-8672 ext 225