aeden

There are multiple providers supporting CNAME-like functionality on the apex that are compatible with Heroku (and other hostname-based endpoints):

* Cloudflare

* DNSMadeEasy

* DNSimple (my company)

* easydns

* PointDNS

I'm certain more will support it as open source name servers add support.

Congrats on the launch, Cliff!

Not yet.

I just set up a test to see how it works. The UI is pretty clean, and yes, it's hosted email. No idea how reliable they will be.

Here are some issues:

They are not picking up DNS changes in a timely fashion, specifically I confirmed all of the DNS changes they requested were made and published to all name servers, but their system is not picking up the changes, which means they could be caching the results or asking a caching resolver when checking the results.

They also have some DNS weirdness going on for their migadu.com zone which they probably should fix:

  ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> @ns1.migadu.com migadu.com
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 34597
  ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 16
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;migadu.com.			IN	A
  
  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  migadu.com.		300	IN	A	94.23.26.57
  
  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  migadu.com.		300	IN	NS	ns1.migadu.com.
  migadu.com.		300	IN	NS	ns2.migadu.com.
  migadu.com.		300	IN	NS	ns1.migadu.com.
  migadu.com.		300	IN	NS	ns2.migadu.com.
  
  ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
  ns1.migadu.com.		300	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns1.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	188.166.110.130
  ns2.migadu.com.		300	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  ns2.migadu.com.		259200	IN	A	162.243.253.115
  
  ;; Query time: 311 msec
  ;; SERVER: 188.166.110.130#53(188.166.110.130)
  ;; WHEN: Thu Feb 25 12:18:22 2016
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 364

Their webmail client is pretty basic. Using the refresh did not work well (spinning busy icon). It's a lot to ask to have a good webmail client in addition to handling email deliverability well.

I sent myself a test email a few minutes ago and so far it's not come through in their web UI.

Bottom line: it's an early product in a very challenging operational space, so I'd keep an eye on them but would think twice about relying on it for production use.

I can't tell from the guides or the site, is Migadu running a hosted email system? Anyone tried it yet? If it is hosted, I wonder what their deliverability rates and reliability look like?

It's really up to you to go out and find them. I suggest looking for local meetups and talking to engineers who are working in those small businesses. Get to know the people in your community running these small businesses.

Most of our hires were introduced through people I know. In a small business this is often the only logical way to hire because you already have some level of trust with the referrer and thus they've acted as the first gateway for a candidate to get through (and they usually can vouch for the candidate's work).

Also, many small businesses are concerned largely with staying alive and making a profit, so that may mean they will be focused on "non-interesting" problems of making the business operate well. Factor this into your decision as to who you want to work for as well.

Ironic that the interview is on Forbes' website. You know, the one that is toast.

Yep, this is another tool we built to help troubleshoot zone issues. We also use it to provide data for some parts of the DNSimple UI since zone.vision has an underlying API (http://api.zone.vision/)

Very cool and potentially quite useful for me!

Out of curiosity, have you considered putting up something on the site comparing Erlbus with other options like RabbitMQ?

Actually, they are no longer owned by Demand Media, rather they are a brand under Rightside.

Keep a list of things you need to do, and then do them. When you do them, cross them off the list. :-)

Seriously though, you don't need a fancy time management technique, just queue things up and do the work.

I'm fairly certain their resolver name servers are separate from their authoritative authoritative name servers.

Not really, no. In general tests for latency aren't that valuable except to perhaps show providers where they might want to place their next PoP, since if you have the ability to look at a finer grain you can actually identify generally where latency presents the greatest problem (i.e. areas where instead of 40ms response time, you see 400ms).

My 2c:

DNS latency is only one factor in overall perceived performance, and it can be affected greatly by routing, traffic load, and other factors. Additionally, many requests you'll make will likely go through a resolver with caching anyhow, so that too can have a significant impact on perceived latency.

Thus DO (or any provider for that matter) only really needs to provide reasonable resolution times from their servers to be effective.

A more important matter is consistency, i.e. are they consistently returning responses or are they actually dropping packets due to load. With a service that's growing quickly, keeping up with the increase in load on their network probably presents a more significant problem.

The tests appear to be looking at a subset of authoritative DNS providers, hence OpenDNS (and Google Public Resolvers), which are resolvers, not authoritative name servers, are not present.

"and even then you can still be screwed if your bandwidth is saturated"

Which is exactly what happened in this case. It sucks to be on the receiving end of this. We couldn't defend against it and let our customers down, and that hurts me deeply. We choose one approach to defense, which was internal, and that was a mistake. We're going to work on rectifying that now.

Anthony from DNSimple here. We discovered it after the fact, via a tip from other DNS providers.

The impact depends largely on their ability to get their root certificate into all of the browsers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with older versions of browsers as well, since if they start with a brand new root certificate then I'm not sure what happens with the older browsers.

If they can get their certificate into all of the browsers then it's possible they could achieve broad adoption for domain-verified certificates. There will still be a market for other validation types (organization validated and extended validation, for example) though.

Unfortunately mandrill does not provide the same type of customizable routing that Mailgun does. Specifically, the ability to set up a forwarding route so that Mailgun handles all of the forwarding is the reason we selected them. To date I have yet to find another email provider that does this and provides API access and multi-domains support.

This is an excellent write up about how the OpenDNS system works to identify malicious DNS activity so they can block it. The idea of a data firehose that consumers can listen to and work with is a powerful one and is something I've found quite useful in systems I work on as well if you're looking to either listen in to the running system or if you want to collect data for analytics.

If they want to reach a billion people then they're going to have to live in a world of touch screen (and maybe voice).

At NDC Oslo this year there was a keynote by Luke Wroblewski on user experience on the web. There's a video on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/97305189

The key takeaway was that a significant percentage of people are using their smart phones with either only their thumb or their forefinger. Many people don't even have a computing device with a traditional keyboard and full-size screen. That talk got me thinking about this question: what would programming look like if you only use your thumb?

I don't think you can write off these interfaces, rather I think we may need to start to really think about separating creation of core components of software and then orchestrating the interaction of these components as a different aspect to developing software.

My take: if you're handling marketing and all you have is someone's phone number you can gather quite a bit of data about that person so you can segment them for marketing purposes.

My sense from reading the page is that it's not designed for you to put data in, rather it's designed to allow someone get data out with just a phone number. Primary use case is probably for gathering additional market segmentation data automatically.

HelloSign is the author's company. He left off the names of the two competing companies who wanted HelloSign's business.

I read the online version of LYSE and it really helped me understand the language and how to use it. Additionally you've helped answer questions along the way and have always been a big contributor to the community.

I've just bought a hard copy of LYSE to say thanks. I own almost no physical books these days, but you are worth it. Thank you!

Are you certain RapidSSL is not accepting SHA-2 is not accepted by RapidSSL? Section 6.1.5.1 of http://www.rapidssl.com/resources/pdfs/geotrustCPSv1dot10.pd... seems to indicate that they do support SHA-2.

Did you speak with them about this yet?

Photographers take many more bad photos than good ones. Entrepreneurs fail more often than they succeed. We just tend to avoid showing bad photos and talking about failed businesses in public.

I'm glad to see the turnaround from the original post that IWMN published earlier this year, Timo, thanks for that.

Anthony from DNSimple here. The ALIAS does synthesize the A record set, but it's the same A record set that is used when a username.github.io domain is resolved, which means it should work fine with Github's DDOS prevention.

The TXT record is only there for informational purposes and could be removed without affecting the system.

Since we have an Anycast network you will also get a result that would be similar to a CNAME resolution, meaning you'll typically get a "close" set of IPs that would be similar to what you would get from the resolution of a CNAME, which ultimately resolves down to A records as well.

>> 2: Don't take VC money unless you're absolutely sure about how you're going to use it to grow your business. > I could be wrong but shouldn't this almost always be to pay your employees?

Warning: opinions ahead, proceed with caution...

I think it's easy to equate your employee headcount with growth, but I think this often leads to companies growing their headcount too fast without the preparation necessary to handle that employee growth. I consider this unhealthy growth.

Contrast this with growing your revenue and profit, which I consider healthy growth. If you take funding because you know how you can channel that funding into further revenue and profit, then you've found an excellent reason to take funding. Anything else and you're doing yourself and everyone involved with your business a disservice.

Yes, if you take funding you will likely grow your employee count, but hopefully you'll do so in a precise fashion, with a plan on how those new employees help improve the bottom line of the business.