4 ms·

I have some familiarity with the .com/.net stuff Yes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what

by swiley 7y ago

I have some familiarity with the .com/.net stuff Yes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what I understand this is partially due to uptime requirements.)

munk-a 7y ago
Can you clarify a bit here? I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.
- toast0 7y ago
  I don't know if there are stats available, but the requests per second has got to be huge. There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.
- amaranth 7y ago
  With a short TTL being standard to allow quick changes and such a wide range of domains you're going to get a lot of cache misses and have to go to the TLD to get the answer.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  I worked for a Registry (.coop) and sat next to the lead, interestingly we (poptel) also bid for .org back in the day and lost to the shysters that are selling out Your right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.

by swiley 7y ago

munk-a 7y ago

Can you clarify a bit here? I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.

toast0 7y ago
I don't know if there are stats available, but the requests per second has got to be huge. There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.
amaranth 7y ago
With a short TTL being standard to allow quick changes and such a wide range of domains you're going to get a lot of cache misses and have to go to the TLD to get the answer.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
I worked for a Registry (.coop) and sat next to the lead, interestingly we (poptel) also bid for .org back in the day and lost to the shysters that are selling out Your right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.