mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
Mark Smith ([staff profile] mark) wrote in [site community profile] dw_maintenance2014-09-04 02:14 pm
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DNS change today

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 [twitter.com profile] 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.

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al_zorra: (Default)

[personal profile] al_zorra 2014-09-05 12:09 am (UTC)(link)
NOT HAPPY giving amazilla any business at all. They treat labor shamefully and are determined to own everything.

Just sayin.

[personal profile] thrashmetals 2014-09-05 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
Then I really hope you don't shop at Walmart or most retail outlets.
ranunculus: (Default)

[personal profile] ranunculus 2014-09-05 03:42 am (UTC)(link)
Gotta agree that I'm really not happy going to Amazon, and no I don't shop at Amazon, Walmart or Mc Donald's.
al_zorra: (Default)

[personal profile] al_zorra 2014-09-05 01:40 pm (UTC)(link)
In fact, I do not.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

[staff profile] denise 2014-09-05 03:52 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not tremendously happy with a lot of Amazon's business practices either, but there are very few options at our volume that are not either ruinously expensive, unreliable enough to lead to regular downtime, or slow enough to cause a noticeable lag in the site's response time.

business practices

[personal profile] babysprite 2014-09-05 03:57 am (UTC)(link)

Understood and appreciated.

Some people have to shop WalMart because they can't afford anywhere else.

Others have to buy from Amazon.com because they're home-bound and can't leave their residences.

/\__/\
(='.'=)
(")_(")
babysprite
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