Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner

Hundreds of thousands of EveryDNS users have been told that their free domain name system service will be cut off by the end of August.

Dynamic Network Services, which acquired EveryDNS in January 2010, is now urging the owners of some 440,000 websites to migrate to its DynDNS-branded premium services.

The upgrade will cost customers a one-time fee of $4.95, which can be used as a credit against the annual DynDNS subscription fee, which usually ranges from $29.95 to $39.95.

The end of the free ride has unsurprisingly miffed some EveryDNS users, with some calling the new fees "outrageous", and Dyn admitted that it expects to lose some customers as a result.

"Rock solid DNS isn’t free," Dyn vice president of product management Cory von Wallenstein said on the company's website.

"Dyn is not the ideal home for everyone on the Internet," he said. "While the vast majority of users on EveryDNS and EditDNS will find their new home with Dyn a welcomed improvement, some will not."

According to the company, both of the soon to be discontinued services could not scale to the increasing demands of their customers, which include the likes of social coding site Github.

EveryDNS ran on just two servers, one in California and one in New York, whereas Dyn's own-brand services use between five and 17 data centers, von Wallenstein said.

Websites use these kinds of DNS services in order to speed page loading times and ensure availability during peak traffic periods. Dyn claims to have a 100 per cent uptime record.

EveryDNS attracted mainstream media attention last December when it yanked DNS service for Wikileaks.org, following a sustained denial of service attack against the site. ®

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