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DynDNS.com Acquires EveryDNS
funfail writes in with the news that, five days ago, EveryDNS was sold to DynDNS.com. From the announcement and e-mail from EveryDNS's founder, David Ulevitch: "Since starting EveryDNS in June of 2001 while a freshman in college, my goal has always been to provide simple, reliable and secure DNS services to the Internet community. I'm proud to say that we've lived up to that mission and delivered robust DNS services to over 400,000 domains. Nearly 9 years later, it's now time to put the service in more capable hands and I'm happy to announce that I've found a great home for EveryDNS. I have sold the EveryDNS service to Dyn Inc., the operators of the immensely popular DynDNS.com service." EveryDNS has been one of the most popular free (or one-time donation) DNS suppliers. From the FAQ at the link above: "Will the service remain free? While we don't 100% have the answer to that yet, we will not be making any changes to the service you are currently receiving for the foreseeable future. We will be discontinuing signups in the near future but existing accounts will remain active and fully functional."
"Will the service remain free? "
As a former DynDNS user, I can assure everyone that the answer will be NO in the not-so-distant future. They've already done it. DynDNS has stopped offering services for free and became overly expensive...suddenly...overnight...or so.
This is actually not good news. Something that used to be nice (aka "cool") and free (aka "beer") is now sold to people who stopped caring about services to go for....oh...PROFIT...I forgot that...
EveryDNS is more like the "custom DNS" feature in DynDNS which uses their servers to provide nameservers for your own domain. DynDNS's custom DNS service is $30/year if you aren't hosting with them, while EveryDNS is/was free.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I've paid for DynDNS service for the last few years - I fell I've received good service at a fair price. I'm happy to see them expanding their business, and I hope they profit enough to continue making me happy.
Since there were several people asking about possible replacements for hosting a DNS zone for free, I thought I'd give a shoutout to zoneedit.com. They do managed DNS, but your first 5 zones are free. I know the website looks like a relic from the 90s, but I've been using them for years and years (hosting 2 domains) and have never had a single issue.
Oblig Disclosure: No relation to the company other than being a satisfied user.
I work for DynDNS Support, so I can clarify what happened here. Our free accounts (ie: no paying services) will expire every 30 days unless you either 1) login to your DynDNS.com account on our site or 2) send an IP address update for one of your hostnames using an update client. Each login or IP address update thus resets the 30 day expiration date on the account. We send out a warning 5 days before the expiration date of the account, giving you time to login to the account to save it. If you do not do that, the account and hostname will be deleted but you can simply sign up again if you lost the account by accident.
For most customers, #2 above will keep their free account active since most ISP's do change their customer's IP addresses often.
It’s worth mentioning that some update clients will automatically force an update in time to avoid the account expiration even if your IP hasn’t changed in that time.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Our CEO Jeremy Hitchcock wrote a welcome letter to EveryDNS customers here http://dyn.com/dd-welcome-everydns that explains a little bit more about our plans for EveryDNS.
I honestly do not have an answer for your specific question, but as of right now there will be no changes to the EveryDNS service in the short term as our welcome letter states.