EveryDNS

» see everydns.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The about page in 2001 asked why people paid for DNS hosting when their phone number was listed in the white pages for free. That was the pitch. EveryDNS would host the zone for any domain you owned at no charge, and if you sent fifteen dollars you became a benefactor and the limits came off. Two Davids were listed as its makers, Ulevitch and Fortunato, and by the following November less than one percent of users had sent anything.

The counter on the front page is the best record of what happened next. 563 domains in August 2001. 13,522 at the start of 2003. 71,454 on New Year's Day 2006, the year Ulevitch went off to found OpenDNS while this one kept running. 201,605 in May 2008 and 420,503 in January 2010. The high mark is 505,940 on 30 May 2011. Two servers, one in Palo Alto and one outside New York City, carried all of it.

Dyn had bought it by the time the WikiLeaks week came. The announcement was made at CES on 7 January 2010, with EveryDNS at over 400,000 domains and 300,000 users, and for a while nothing changed except a Powered by Dyn badge on the logo. In June 2011 Dyn's Cory von Wallenstein wrote a post titled Rock Solid DNS Isn't Free, which called the two-server setup unsustainable. Users had until 31 August to move to a paid Dyn product for a $4.95 fee. The website closed on schedule. Dyn's status page had the final retirement set for 4 September; the farewell page that stayed up after says 9 September, and that is the date used here.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the phone book argument ~

The stack was Daniel Bernstein's tinydns, with MySQL and Perl feeding its hash tables and PHP in front, a 2001 stack that nobody would build today and that never stopped working. The service did dynamic DNS for home connections and zone transfers for people running their own secondaries, and benefactors got SPF records. The donation page in 2002 listed everyone who had given, by name and date, going back to the two founders on 23 May 2001.

The site later said it had started in June 2001, and Wikipedia repeats that. The captures say otherwise: on 18 May 2001 the front page read Launch in 1 days, and the first two donations, from the founders themselves, are dated 23 May.

~ the wikileaks night ~

On 1 December 2010, at about 10PM Eastern, EveryDNS emailed wikileaks.org a 24-hour termination notice. At the same hour the next night the records were gone. The statement on everydns.com opened with the words First, let's be clear, this is a difficult issue to deal with, and then made the case in infrastructure terms: wikileaks.org had become the target of repeated distributed denial of service attacks, and those attacks threatened the stability of a system that enabled access to almost 500,000 other websites. The front page that week added that the company believed in its New Hampshire state motto, Live Free or Die.

The name was too close to easyDNS. For two days easyDNS, a Toronto company that had never hosted WikiLeaks, took the abuse meant for New Hampshire, and Wired had to run a correction on the 9th. WikiLeaks moved to a Swiss domain. A free DNS host is the kind of thing that got passed around the student forums in my TTNet years, and the name still reached me the way it reached everyone outside the hosting trade, in that week's headlines.

~ four dollars ninety-five to leave ~

The migration was the retirement. Users were pointed at DynDNS Custom DNS or Dynect SMB and asked for a $4.95 migration fee. Scheduled outages ran from 29 August to 3 September 2011. The last 200 from the front page is dated 28 August; from 1 September it redirects. Dyn's notice thanked all who have used EditDNS and EveryDNS over the years and pointed at Managed DNS.

Both everydns.net and everydns.com now forward to dyn.com, which sends you on to an Oracle page about cloud DNS, Oracle having bought Dyn in 2016 and retired that name too in 2023. The 2001 wordmark read DNS for the rest of us. The exit price was $4.95.

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