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Domain registrar and DNS for a company are too critical and fragile to go cheap on. For personal, hobby, one-off marketing domains; sure go cheap. But for som

by flurdy 8y ago

Domain registrar and DNS for a company are too critical and fragile to go cheap on. For personal, hobby, one-off marketing domains; sure go cheap. But for something you earn money from? Go with highy recommended providers. Registrars with a secure administration, good track record of customer service, high reliability, etc. Also spread the risk around. Don't have domain, DNS, and services with one provider. E.g. register domain with Gandhi, Hover etc, use DNS from Cloudflare, Route56, etc, and host with GCP, Heroku etc (for example). And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. That way not all of your domains disappears overnight. And as many have mentioned already on this topic: Have well documented, well practised renewal processes, and renew for multiple years if possible.

mmt 8y ago
> And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. I'd add only on refinement: if possible, use domains with different top-level (national) authorities. Sadly, this kind of operational wisdom is rapidly being lost by the emphasis on hiring "DevOps" engineers, with most of the emphasis on the "Dev" part, since they're often just coders against cloud APIs, with much less value placed on traditional sysadmin (or what ended up being called operations engineering during and after the dot-com boom) experience. Now, of course, that makes sense not to hire a full-time 100% sysadmin if what you (think you) need is a 5% (or less) sysadmin. Also, most startups, and probably even larger businesses, are going to be easily lulled into complacency by the uptime records of the larger vendors (or really just AWS), when following the best practices for technical reliability. "Infrastructure as code" is supposed to alleviate the human/administrative risk, and I'm actually convinced that it does to a very large degree (just at a huge cost in markup/profit for Amazon for that infrastructure).

by flurdy 8y ago

mmt 8y ago

> And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. I'd add only on refinement: if possible, use domains with different top-level (national) authorities. Sadly, this kind of operational wisdom is rapidly being lost by the emphasis on hiring "DevOps" engineers, with most of the emphasis on the "Dev" part, since they're often just coders against cloud APIs, with much less value placed on traditional sysadmin (or what ended up being called operations engineering during and after the dot-com boom) experience. Now, of course, that makes sense not to hire a full-time 100% sysadmin if what you (think you) need is a 5% (or less) sysadmin. Also, most startups, and probably even larger businesses, are going to be easily lulled into complacency by the uptime records of the larger vendors (or really just AWS), when following the best practices for technical reliability. "Infrastructure as code" is supposed to alleviate the human/administrative risk, and I'm actually convinced that it does to a very large degree (just at a huge cost in markup/profit for Amazon for that infrastructure).