Domain registrar’s web site down for two days due to hardware failure.
Domain name registrar Dynadot is recovering from a hardware failure that took dynadot.com offline for two days. Webhosting, dns servers, website forwarding, parking, and email forwarding were not affected.
In an email to customers, Dynadot president Todd Han explained:
…Although we had prepared for such a situation by using redundant hardware and performing frequent backups, when it actually happened it took us longer than expected to recover. During this time I was 100% focused on getting the site back up, and neglected to inform you, our customers, what was going on. Those of you who were upset about this lack of communication are completely justified, and I apologize.
This is the first major hardware failure we have ever experienced in our 6 years in business, and we have learned some good lessons. In the coming months we plan to redesign our infrastructure to further increase the fault tolerance of our systems. Secondly, we plan to develop “dynadot.info” to be a system status website hosted at a different data center. This site will have alternative ways to contact us, and a frequently updated blog if our systems ever go down again.
When you run as many servers as we do, and are growing as fast as we are, hardware problems become a “when” rather than a “if”. We promise to improve our handling of these situations from now on.
Dynadot is one of the 50 largest domain registrars with over 300,000 domains registered according to RegistrarStats.
Dynadot customers seem to have two major concerns according to a post in the company’s forum. First, some customers are reporting domains missing from their accounts. Second, customers who were tasting domains went over the grace period and are now stuck with the domains.
Ahhh… those poor tasters. Now they have to pay for the domains that they were mooching on, I feel bad=).
@ Troy:
All the b1tching that’s been going on is ridiculous. I never imagined “everyday domainers” tasting 100+ domains per day! You win some, you lose some… right? In domaining, always expect the unexpected. I had some API commands go through fine while they were down.
Sammy,
I agree. When you try to “play the system” you have to realize that you will quite possibly be stung at some point and no crying when it comes.
Downtime sucks.
2 days is unheard of.. Damn !
As for those “poor tasters” they can always do a charge back if you used a credit card to process the original order… But that actually requires a brain to figure out.
🙂