DNSimple Blog

I asked Perplexity: Using the same provider for both domain registration and DNS hosting can present several risks. Here are the primary risks and ways to mitigate or prevent them:

## Risks

1. *Single Point of Failure*: - If the provider experiences an outage, both your domain registration and DNS services could be affected, leading to downtime for your website and email services[2].

2. *Security Vulnerabilities*: - Using a single provider increases the risk of DNS hijacking, DNS cache poisoning, and other DNS attacks if the provider's security is compromised[3][4].

3. *Limited DNS Features*: - Some domain registrars that offer DNS services may not provide advanced DNS features like DNSSEC, Anycast, or DDoS protection, which are crucial for security and performance[2][5].

4. *Vendor Lock-in*: - It may be more challenging to transfer your domain or DNS services to another provider if both are managed by the same company, potentially leading to higher costs or service disruptions[1].

## Mitigation Strategies

1. *Use DNSSEC*: - Implement DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) to protect against DNS hijacking and cache poisoning. DNSSEC adds a layer of security by enabling DNS responses to be verified using digital signatures[3][4].

2. *Redundancy and Backup*: - Use secondary DNS providers to ensure redundancy. This way, if your primary DNS provider experiences an outage, the secondary provider can handle DNS queries, minimizing…

I've heard good things about them from friends. This article was the last straw for me -- I just migrated my 90 domains off of GoDaddy. Actually, I didn't. I just told DNSimple to do all the work, via their (brilliant) concierge onboarding option: http://blog.dnsimple.com/2014/01/domain-transfer-concierge-service/

"Here's my credit card and GoDaddy creds, guys, and here's a technical note about my DNS settings that I want you to pay extra special attention to. Tell me when I should expect to start getting the GoDaddy confirmation emails. Other than that, have fun playing with DNS settings -- I never want to even think about them again."

This post is 5% "Here's my recommendation for a DNS service" and 95% "Notice how in return for an hour or two of grunt work a SaaS company just made it very easy for me to award them $2,000 of high-margin recurring revenue a year despite being twice as expensive as my pre-existing option by successfully overcoming my 'I would love to move off my existing solution but it requires grunt work so I think I'll punt on that decision for, oh, eight years' objection? That's a really good trade. You should consider offering it in your SaaS business, too, in any way that makes sense for it."

You can use a global set of variables for typography, colors, borders, box-shadows, and spacings. This could be CSS variables, SASS, or Javascript variables in CSS-in-JS.

Typography and colors are something almost everyone tries to keep within a bounded set, but spacings are often overlooked. If the designer has defined a clear set of spacings - like 8px for small, 24 for medium, and 48px for large, then we can build consistent interfaces by using that as a primitive. Button paddings will be $small-spacing, while sections can be separated by $large-spacing etc.

The stylesheet at this point is just an application of all these base values to the HTML structure of the particular component, and that arrangement can be unique to each component depending on how its HTML is laid out.

http://tachyons.io does this really well - @mrmrs_ has teased out a universal set of base values that can cover most designs, and has built out a complete UI kit out of it. There are many experience reports online, here's how DNSimple went about it - https://blog.dnsimple.com/2017/01/CSS-journey/.

At least between Kraków, Warsaw, and nearby cities like Brno, Czech Republic, any cost differences are inconsequential compared to the impact that an experienced, bicultural (has lived and worked in both countries) local team leader will make.

If someone from your team isn’t bicultural, consider recruiting the team leader in any of these cities. When you find someone who you believe in enough to make a first-class part of the team (including whatever you’d offer a senior dev manager in the US, like stock options), let them use their existing network to build the local team.

Hopefully this is obvious, but just in case: if no one on your team is bicultural and the team is tiny, like 2 or 3, it makes no sense to accept all the effort of a second culture, management, and timezone. For a tiny team like that, build an entirely location-independent team - see https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/ or https://blog.dnsimple.com/2015/04/the-dnsimple-team-on-remote-working/.

Fantastic list with much more depth than I expected. Some surprises that others might be interested in from this article and comments below:

[1] Keeping buckets locked down and allowing direct client -> S3 uploads
[2] Using ALIAS records for easier redirection to core AWS resources instead of CNAMES.
[3] What's an ALIAS?
[-] Using IAM Roles
[4] Benefits of using a VPC
[-] Use '-' instead of '.' in S3 bucket names that will be accessed via HTTPS.
[-] Automatic security auditing (damn, entire section was eye-opening)
[-] Disable SSH in security groups to force you to get automation right.

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/PresignedUrlUploadObject.html

[2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/CreatingAliasRRSets.html

[3] http://blog.dnsimple.com/2011/11/introducing-alias-record/

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5hsL-JNY4

For example, see the .audio domain or any of the other Uniregistry domains that went through a massive as much as 1400% price increase in 2017 after people had already bought domains. https://blog.dnsimple.com/2017/08/uniregistry-tld-price-increase/

It caused quite a stir. I luckily was able to get grandfathered pricing for a .audio domain through my registrar (namecheap). Although their system did fail at one point and charged me the non-grandfathered price at one point, and I had to go to support for a refund. What a headache