In response to an e-mail received from one of the current DNS providers demanding another payment (trivial as it is) for hosting my web sites' DNS services, I decided to give a little overhaul and move as many as I could over to FreeDNS.ws.

Previously I was using ZoneEdit.com to provide DNS when I had to stop providing my own DNS. Coming due in February, I'm to give a small ($11) ransom to

Well, a more verbose description, in 1995/1996 I started a little ISP. Along with all of the things we had to do, we hosted our own DNS. When we moved from the office (and gave up on providing dial-up service), we moved the web and mail servers, too. Unfortunately, static IP wasn't an option where we moved the servers, so a search gave ZoneEdit as a spot that would work with dynamic DNS. They offered 5 domains for free, provided traffic wasn't over the 200MB/month limit (which is a lot of DNS requests), and had a small fee for "credits" to host additional domains or allow additional traffic.

Probably stretching their terms, I created multiple accounts, aligning the domains we were hosting with the registrations, keeping all of my own(ed) domains together, and spreading the rest out, which kept me under the 5 domain limit in all cases. This little cheat, I felt, was not a horrible cheat, as it was the case that each registration for domains we hosted got its own account. Sure, I did all of the work, but I did the same for the domain registration, but still didn't own the domains? More correctly I could have told the domain owners to just do it themselves and the stretch wouldn't have happened.

As domains left our service for others, I'd remove the ZoneEdit entries/accounts, and lighten their load, and relieved the term stretching.

As some new domains were added, I decided to not press my luck. I found another service, FreeDNS. In addition to offering free DNS hosting, with dynamic updates, they have a kind of sharing deal where anyone can select any domain already hosted in their service and add a host/IP to it. In fact, they "require" domains they host to share in such a way. One can choose to disallow certain hosts, to help avoid abuse and such.

They offer premium services where you can remove your domain from this sharing pool, too. In the time I've been using the service, only a few "requests" have come in, and in the "open" (no request) domains, it seems their service found the abuse before I did, and only one additional host had been added to any of the domains. It's arguably an abuse, as it's a really long and unfortunately unfriendly set of names that point to an on-line "dating" site (that I visited only to see if the host was used, but didn't sign up or review any more than their home page).

A short while ago, I finally got static IP addressing again, and suddenly had no need for dynamic DNS support. I did leave the existing services alone, both because it worked and I didn't want to upset it, but also because I used some of the dynamic service to "IP myself" when away from the home office.

Since getting the static IPs, a couple more domains have been added, and rather than put them in the pool of this new shared dynamic DNS or slight the original dynamic service, and because I didn't require any dynamic service, I sought another free service, and found FreeDNS.ws, as previously noted.

All caught up?

Since I just got the notice about another payment, I decided it was time to spend a little bit rearranging the DNS for all of my hosted domains and sub-domains. It took a couple of hours, mostly because I was doing it in the background and had to re-authenticate a number of times with the domain registrar as my session expired, but now all but a few of the domains have been moved to the new service.

Three little guys that aren't really used might get the boot anyway. Two are domains grabbed when I worked for the video game company, to hold the domains for additional game ideas we had, and one for a blog for a game clan I joined (which was disbanded shortly after, and which I stopped playing some short-ish time after that).

The one big guy that remains not on the new service is the one that started this whole process and also has the most DNS to move. I'm pausing now to allow DNS propagation to have time to ensure that the domains I did affect are changed, and then I'll remove them from the old services. That is, for the couple that remain now on two services. All of the domain registrations are updated, and the new DNS service has the current DNS information. Some of the old DNS accounts have been deleted, so it may be that some of those domains won't be found in the interim (whoops), but few of the domains are heavily trafficked anyway.

The next thing I'll probably do is get my own DNS set up again. I've got the static IPs now, which is really the key to having the service. It has been nice saving the DNS traffic (and potential abuses), but again, it's trivial traffic, and I can do my own for free no matter what.