DNS change today

[mark]

Hi all,

We had a brief outage this morning. The cause was an (unexpected) policy change by our DNS provider, Dyn, deciding to shut us off. They had to roll back the change for unrelated reasons so we were back online, but it does mean that we need to migrate off of their service.

ETA: The policy change was that, for about 10 years now -- as long as I've been using Dyn! -- they had no usage/quota limits on their DNS service. Given that DNS requests are tiny and easy to serve, this made sense. They made a business decision recently to establish some (rather tiny) quotas. We're ... quite in excess of them (by some 15,000%) and we don't want to pay in excess of $500 USD/month for DNS service. Amazon's price is 10% of that. They probably tried to contact us, but I don't recall seeing any emails. Anyway, that's it; it's nothing particularly nefarious.

We will be moving our DNS service to Amazon's Route53 service. This kind of migration is fairly easy technically, but if there are problems it will probably mean Dreamwidth will be offline until they can be resolved. And, given the nature of how DNS works, it means that any outage will probably be measured in hours rather than minutes.

I've done my best to ensure that the changeover will go smoothly. If anything happens, though, we'll be on our dreamwidth account to keep everybody apprised of the progress.

The switch will be flipped around 3:30pm PDT / 2230 UTC today, this is in about 90 minutes.