Making DNSimple

Today we are joined by Anthony Eden, founder and CEO of DNSimple. Anthony, welcome.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Or is it DN’s Imple…?

Or, yes, it could be DNS Imple. It’s true.

Oh… Which one is it? [laughter]

No, it’s DNSimple. You definitely said it right, Jerod.

I drilled it. Well, that would be nice, because I’ve been saying that way in my head for all these years. We’ve been longtime customers of yours. I think, Adam, you signed us up –

Forever ago?

…in the before times. I don’t know, ancient history, right?

Yeah, I think I’ve used DNSimple everywhere I could use them. So personally, corporately, jobs I’ve taken you to… I think Pure Charity still might be using DNSimple to this day. I don’t know.

Well, I appreciate that. That’s awesome.

Big fan.

Thank you.

How long has it been around, Anthony, and why did you start this thing?

We just hit 15 years, actually, this month.

Okay.

So the first lines of code were written at the beginning of April in 2010. At the time I was just coming off working at a startup out in Hawaii. I was the CTO at a startup that was also in the domain industry. We actually had the rights to operate and sell the .mp top-level domain, which was for the Mariana Pacific Islands. And we had built this service around it called Chimp, which is supposed to be this aggregate of all your social networks. This is at a time when social networks were really starting to take off, and everybody’s like “Oh, there’s just too many of them. I wish I could aggregate everything into one…” Anyway, we built this whole thing… It never really moved past the friends and family money round, and the founder who had created it really wanted to see it go big or not. If it wasn’t going to go big, he wasn’t really interested in it. And at the time, I was using pretty much the most well-known provider out there, and I was like “Wow, this sucks. This experience is really terrible. And I’ve been in this industry for 17 years… Why don’t I try and go build something?”

There you go.

And so that was kind of the genesis. And I started it with my brother. He’s like an ops guy, on the DevOps side, and he did most of the setup of all the servers, and then I wrote all the first code; basically everything, in the very early days.

Well, the biggest provider out there - I bet we could guess what that one was…

You probably could… [laughs]

Is it still –

It is, yes.

It still is, to this day.

Yeah, they still are the biggest provider of domain registrations in the world, I’m pretty sure.

That’s interesting. And then .mp - I mean, Chimp was the first one that I thought of… And it’s like, what else? Blimp? And then maybe Simp? I don’t know. After that, you run out.

There was Bump…

Oh, okay…

There was actually a service where they were doing phone-to-phone trading of contact information way back in the days, and it was called Bump. So yeah, there were a lot of those little name hacks…

[laughs]

What about Trump?

Oh. That’d be expensive or cheap.

He’d be interested in that…

Yeah, it would.

Right?

[unintelligible 00:06:30.19] going on that one.

“Let me get my T-R-U-M-P domain… [laughter] Anyways…

I always thought running a TLD would be like easy money, wouldn’t it? Because you’re pretty much – like, you’re on a registrar… You’re kind of just gatekeeping online real estate, aren’t you? Isn’t that kind of good business to be in, or no?

I mean, I think that the registry business is potentially a very good business to be in. Especially once they opened up to new TLDs. You still have to have the right marketing arm to be able to get adoption of that name. So registries are going to be the ones running the TLD, and registrars are going to be reselling that. So you have to convince registrars to also go out and actually sell your domain. And you have to have sort of a differentiator, unless you have a really good top-level domain. It is a very interesting space, though. That last round, believe it or not, was in 2012, and we’re actually due up for another round. So ICANN, the group that oversees all of the generic top-level domains, is getting ready to open a new round of new TLD submissions. And of course, the price has gone up… That’s the other thing, it’s very capital-intensive in the beginning, and so you have to at least have a plan that recovers that capital.

I remember when they first announced they were going to add all these vanity TLDs, all these new ones, and you could submit your ideas… And of course, I thought of all the other ones everybody else did… Like “Oh, .app’s going to be huge. I should just go start that.” And I was like “Why not? It’s the internet. You don’t need permission. I’m going to go figure out how to be like the .app TLD.” It turns out you do need permission, and a lot of money.

[00:08:10.16] Yes, you do. [laughter] Yes, absolutely.

I got stopped real quick.

It’s fun, though. It’s an interesting business. And in this case, the Mariana Pacific Islands had given the rights to the founder of that company for quite a while, and so we had the opportunity to both run the registry - so that was for the country itself , and we had a few TLDs that were theirs, and then everything else, they were like “Just do what you want and make sure that it’s within the boundaries of what we think is reasonable.” So the idea was just give away domains to people for their own personal sites where they’re aggregating the stuff together. It was fun, it was interesting, but it did not last. We just kind of missed – we were zigging when we should have been zagging, let’s put it that way.

It’s a fun way to start. I mean, that’s a good initial start.

Yeah.

I mean, could you imagine, Jerod, saying you ran a TLD for a bit, and you kind of zigged when you should have zagged? That’s kind of fun.

I mean, I can imagine saying it, but I can’t imagine actually doing it. The big idea, I assume, is right there in the name for DNSimple. The big player, who still is unnamed at this point, is not simple.

Correct.

It’s a mess, it’s actually complicated.

So not simple.

And all these add-ons, and just the crapware that we all despise as software developers…

Deceptive UX is probably the worst culprit for me. Deceptive UX.

Oh yeah, for sure. And then the upsells, and the auto renews you’re not ready for… Anyways. Was it just like “Let’s just make the easiest thing possible”? I mean, is that pretty much the idea, or is it a bigger idea than that, to get started?

I think it was that straightforward. I looked at the interface and I said “I want to take everything out that I can from the registrar.” Well, even before that, from the DNS interface, right? Because I was actually focused first just on the operational DNS side of it. And I was like “What can I do that’s the simplest thing?” And so I did that first, got it enough to the point where we could launch… So I wrote the first bit of code in April, we launched in July… And at that point, it was essentially a functional, authoritative DNS provider, running on really minimal hardware. I mean, we had four name servers that were on VPS’es from companies like Small Orange - I don’t know if you’ve heard of them - and Linode, we had one on Linode at the time…

I remember Linode, yeah.

So we had these VPS’es that were super-underpowered. We were not ready to do this. But it worked out from the beginning, and then at that point folks were like “Oh, why don’t you do the registration side of it?” Because I actually didn’t want to do the registration side at first. They’re like “Everything else is terrible.” I said “Okay, I’ll take a look into it.” I found a way to do that, and by October I had launched the initial registration support.

Okay. So Adam - 15 years… You might have been right there at the beginning. How did you find DNSimple?

A little friend group named Steve and Alan ran LeSS everything called LeSS Conference. I think I met you, Anthony, face-to-face…

Yeah.

You may not remember this… If we did, I barely remember. It might as well be just made up. We met at LeSS Conf. I think you were a sponsor of their conference. That’s why I knew you lived in Florida… Did I just dox you a little bit? Geez, I’m sorry.

No, that’s okay. That’s alright. I don’t mind.

You don’t live in Florida. That was an accident.

It’s okay. [laughs]

But I think it was in –

In France. Who knows where he lives…?

I think it was back in 2009, 2010. I don’t even remember. The last Less Conf, I think, was when I met you. At the beach.

Was that the one where we were – yes, I was just going to say, where we all went into the water…

Yeah, on the island. It was amazing.

Yes, exactly. It was. It was a really awesome Less Conf. And they used to put on really, really good events. So that was a good place to meet.

Yeah. It was a good place to meet. I feel like I met a lot of people at Future of Web Apps, LeSS Conf, and just this era of when I met particular people. I think I met Chris Coyier for the first time at Less Conf. Yeah, a couple other folks, I’m sure, at that conference. David Hauser, founder of Grasshopper… A couple others. But anyways, I think for the same reason you’re mentioning, Jerod, the simplicity, the feature I recall being the killer feature was when you started or had your DNS set up, you could do – I don’t even know what you call them, Anthony, so fill in the blanks here…

[00:12:26.20] One-click services.

Yes, one-click services.

You’d just click it and it’d be like “Oh, turn on all the DNS needed for Google.”

Yes, exactly. Like, who wants to go and manually do all that minutiae? You made it simple. It was a simple interface. I think this is before LetsEncrypt. We were buying SSL certificates and renewing them through you. That was fairly painless. I mean, as painless as dealing with SSL can be. There’s always some hurdle there… And you’ve been our DNS provider forever, basically. Forever.

That’s really awesome. Yeah, and I think the idea of simplicity - it’s something that’s really… We struggle year after year to try not to cross that boundary of “Where do things get too complex?” And it’s really hard when you have lots of different folks from different areas who are asking for things to be implemented in a way that’s comfortable for them. Because not everybody sees an application in the same way. Everybody has their own perspective on what easy is. So back in the early days –

Or simple, yeah.

Yeah. it was like, simple was pretty straightforward. And it very quickly started to get less simple. And especially since there’s a lot of rules that are dictated by outside forces. That also doesn’t help us.

Such as?

So, for example in the domain name space - you know, a lot of us are familiar with the basics about domain names, like what we see with the .com. But the second that you start selling country code TLDs, a lot of those countries have certain restrictions. For example, they require additional fields. They’re called extended attributes. And so now your interface has to start evolving to support that. Some of those fields are text fields. Some of them are radio buttons. Some of them are checkboxes. So the complexity starts to grow very quickly. And then you have to decide, “Well, if I have 1% of my customer base that might need this TLD, and it adds this complexity, do we do it? How do we do it? How do we make sure that we don’t overdo it and make something that sort of makes everything else buggy and defective?” So it’s been a struggle, and it’s kind of one of those guiding lights that we always do, which is look for those customer pains and then try to automate things. And automating a lot of it away, I think, is what gets a lot of that simplicity.

Are there certain TLDs that were locked out of as a registrar, based on some sort of criteria or buy-in?

Yes. Yes.

Because one of the pains that I’ve had with everybody over the years - and you guys are no exception - is like 99% of my domains fit there, but then there’s one that I want that you don’t support, or somebody else doesn’t support. And we were recently transferring PracticalAI.fm over to Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson, the hosts of that show, and I was on the call with Daniel, and it was just like a – it was a mess. Because I know we were at DNSimple, we also have a name.com, we have a Hover, and then he had a Squarespace, and a Hover, and a this… And we’re just like “How come – why can’t you just have one that has everything?” Is that just not possible, Anthony, or what?

It’s very, very difficult, because the – so as I mentioned, the country codes, a lot of them require presence in that country to even be able to sell to be a registrar. And if they don’t require presence, they require very specific requirements that aren’t like anything else. There are some that don’t even operate on standard protocols. There are some that don’t even allow you to buy using the internet. We’ve found some – friends and I were joking about .ck, I think it was, which requires that you physically go to the offices in the Cook Islands in order to get one of those domains registered.

Dang…

[00:16:08.16] So yeah, there’s a lot of craziness out there. Not to mention highly regulated TLBs, things like .bank, .gov, .edu… These all require very specific sets – they have very specific set of requirements that you have to follow. And it makes it challenging, for sure.

I think in many cases, though, we could support something, but nobody’s ever asked. So that’s one of the things we’ve been looking into recently. I’m kind of jumping forward to the present time a little, but we are taking an initiative to look at all the TLBs we don’t support now, that we could support, and figure out what the investment is for each one of them, and then add those ones that are pretty straightforward, so that that way we’re trying to move towards that goal of being able to support as many as possible without increasing the complexity too much.

Like driving to the Cook Islands? Oh, you can’t even drive there. Flying…

[laughs] Can you imagine the registration fees? “We’ll do it for you. You just need to book my travel to the Cook Islands, or pay for it, and I’m going to need a hotel while I’m out there. And I need to stay a week, at least.” It’s kind of a tough sell…

I don’t even know where the Cook Islands are. Are they nice? I mean, would you want to vacation there? Because –

I don’t know…!

“I don’t know…” [laughs] We’ll find out.

There’s one particular TLD, Tonga, which is .to. And of course, my last name is Santo, so I wanted san.to. And I wanted it for many years. And the only place you can buy it is a specific Tonga-run website, that requires you to email a person… And then they’ll email you back and be like “Sorry, it’s taken.” And so I’ve been – it’s been taken for years, no one’s using it, and I had a recurring reminder once a year to email the Tonga people and see if I can have that domain.

Eventually, I just gave up on it. But yeah, there’s some weird ones out there.

Funny enough, I actually helped… Have you heard of the service Tito? Ti.to?

Yes.

So I helped Paul with the acquisition of ti.to back in the days.

Okay, so let’s talk after the show. You can get me San.to.

I can’t remember how I did it… [laughs]

I’ve wanted it for years. Like, literally 10 years, at least.

I think that may have been 10 years ago that I helped him with that. I’m not sure.

I wish that we had met back then. Maybe I’d have san.to right now.

Maybe.

Well, speaking of registering domains, is that a top level service, to use a pun a little bit…? Is that a first class citizen to your business, registering domains and managing domains?

So the management part, yes. The registration – it’s so strange, as we’ve been navigating how DNSimple has run over the years, I never wanted it to be a registrar like you think of registrars. I always wanted it to be a DNS company first, and the registrar was going to be an afterthought. Because I said “There’s just no margins in the registrar business. It’s so cutthroat.” And over the years, my customers have continued to push and say “No, no. What we want is for you to be a registrar.” So over the last couple of years we’ve been investing more of the team’s time and making sure that the registrar component becomes a first-class citizen.

Now, I look at it as – we split our business almost evenly between the registrar, the DNS, so the operational DNS, and then we have little slivers of a couple other pieces of business, like the certificate side of business and email forwarding and things like that. But for the most part now - yes, I feel the domain registration part is mostly equal, with one notable glaring exception, which is our workflow doesn’t look like any other registrar’s workflow when you buy a domain, because you have to have an account first. And you have to have already put your credit card in. And most registrars are like “Here’s a text field. Start typing, and we’ll suggest things if what you want isn’t available, and then we’ll take you through that registration flow.” And we flipped that and said “First, you have to have an account. You have to put your card on file. And then you can register as many domains as you want.”

[00:19:52.16] That’s why I asked that question, because for as long as we’ve been a customer, we’ve never registered a domain through DNSimple. And I think it’s for those reasons. It’s because I think for a while they’re super-fast domain search. I don’t even remember what it’s called. It was something super-fast…

Instant name search.

Thank you. There you go. So I mean, you can have an idea, and then get all the different TLDs that might match to that. And then you can obviously register it. And I think that was good for the novelty of being able to quickly search through a domain name when you have an idea.

Yeah.

And then – and this is unsolicited, this is not even sponsored, but my default now is to go to hover.com and search across there. I mean, I land on a page, it gives me a text field, it’s mobile friendly, it’s desktop-friendly… And they’ve gotten our money, literally, for as long as we’ve known you. For 15 years. And you haven’t. And so I asked that question to say, why have they gotten all of our money, insofar as as much money we’ve spent on managing, registering, and renewing domains, and you haven’t? Why is that?

Yeah, it was very much intentional from the beginning. I can’t say that it’ll always be the case, but it was intentional to be very clear to our audience that we were going to be an operational DNS company for engineers. We’ll be happy to support the domain registration side, you can transfer domains in DNSimple… But our goal, really, in the beginning, was to focus on the DNS side of things.

Over the years, I think we’ve had more folks though, the ones who actually do register domains, are doing it through the API. So they’re building domain registration into whatever service they’re offering. And they’re essentially just – their customers never see us. And so that’s where we’ve seen the majority of the growth. And again, because we’re engineer-friendly, it makes a lot of sense. They don’t want to send their engineers to a place where they have to type something in. They want to provide that interface. And so they do.

You know, at some point in the future we may have some flows and some workflows that allow people to go in and do a search. We actually did, for quite a while, have a search mechanism that was powered by a company called Domainer.

Yeah, I remember Domainer.

Yeah, we never really invested the time necessary to make that interface really, really good… And so I was never super-happy with it. So at one point we said, “Well, we’ll just take it out, because we don’t think that people are using it. Our data doesn’t show that people are using it. They’re coming to us to register domain they already know they want, and they already know is available.” And so our availability check is just like the last step until they go into the registration flow. Sometimes you have to make intentional decisions when you’re running a business to get the right audience, right? We didn’t want to just be another registrar.

Yeah. Well, I think the reason why I’m pulling on that thread is it’s – obviously, you’re still here, it’s 15 years later. You haven’t died as a business. You’re thriving, it seems, and you could speak to those details. But I would imagine that being able to – thanks, Jerod, for the little laughter there… I think being able to register domains is like honey, right? It’s like an attractor. It’s going to attract potentially some bears, but ultimately, maybe some bees, who knows?

No, it’s fair. Look, it’s a fair point. I’ve had a lot of people over the years tell me – even inside the team, we’ve talked “Why don’t we put the registration part up front, and flip the equation back, so that we look like a registrar?” And the counter argument has always been “Well, then we become just like everybody else. What sets us different from them?” But maybe it’s the inevitable evolution of where we will go. Often I’ve let this business be driven in the direction that our customers want to go, more than what I necessarily want personally. And that’s okay. That’s one of the reasons why we’re still in business. And we’ve always been profitable, we’ve always been a stable, steady growth business because the customers are the key. They’re the ones who set the direction we’re going to go, and we’ve tried to listen to them and make that work.

For sure.

So how do you find the right customers?

[00:24:04.03] A lot of it’s about messaging. Our messaging has changed over the years through many different iterations to kind of massage it towards a direction that will speak to a certain customer base. So in the very early days it was very minimalistic. It was very much engineer-focused. It looked good enough, but it was clear that “Oh, this is a tool that an engineer put together.” And we focused on highlighting things like the API. And originally, we had like a command line interface, which when you think about it, it’s just hilarious that, okay, why would you have a command line interface to register domains? But people really like – the engineers really like the idea. And then as we grew, there were other things that we were interested in, other audiences beyond engineers that we were trying to get. We didn’t want to lose that base, because they are our core base, but we wanted to expand for example, into engineers that are focusing on marketing. They’re registering domains to put up marketing sites, and so they need things to be quick in a certain way.

They need URL forwarding with HTTPS termination because “Oh, Google now requires all URLs to have an HTTPS endpoint really, if they’re going to be treated well.”

So we would build features, and then we would work on how we describe our service from the front page, from the conferences we go to, from the people we talk to, to try to reach that correct audience. So I think a lot of it is just making a decision, making a conscious choice, and then sticking with the language and the positioning to get there.

I just wonder… 15 years of doing DNS management. I don’t want to be reductive - and you can ask us the same question, because we’ve been doing this show for a very long time… But it’s like, how can you get up and do that every day, 15 years later? Have you ever thought about something else? [laughter]

I’ve thought about that question…

“Let’s get out the coffee, and the crump, whatever… Let’s think about some things here.”

Yeah, so over the years I’ve had moments where I’ve really loved doing this, and other moments where I haven’t. Because operationally, it’s 24/7/365 operations, right? It never shuts down. We can’t shut down. And there were ways – I felt a lot better when we first started getting team members in, who could share that burden, to make sure that was happening. And then I spent a lot of time writing software, until I really wasn’t needed to write software anymore, because we had a team that was good enough to write better software than what I could do. And so then I started shifting focus. “Okay, I’m going to focus on customer service.” And then I was going to focus on marketing. So I’ve kind of evolved through all the different – I pretty much have been in every position at DNSimple, shockingly or not shockingly.

At the end of the day though, I’m a nerd for DNS. I don’t know what it is… I was in an ICANN meeting recently in Seattle, and I was loving it. It’s so nerdy. It’s policy stuff. I mean, it’s crazy.

What are you talking about, that you were nerding out about? I mean, anything particularly juicy?

Well, the new TLD stuff. I was talking to folks who were talking about all the new TLD…

Yeah, .pizza?

What’s that?

.pizza?

No, no, no. Beyond. The one that’s about to come.

Oh, the new one.

The next rounds that’s going to come up.

Ooh. Can you tease?

And they were talking about – well, sure. So for example, this – I’m going to get into the weeds here for a second.

Okay.

One of the things that made the first round of new TLDs interesting was when you had competition for a top-level domain between multiple parties who wanted to register it, it went to auction. And when they bid on an auction, some of those auctions got very expensive. For example, I think we were talking earlier about .app. .app I believe ultimately sold for 10 million. Google had to pay 10 million for that one TLD. The interesting part about it is the 10 million got split up against the other people who were in the auction. So they actually made money just by being in the auction.

[00:28:07.02] Who made money?

The other ones who were submitting for it. I can’t remember which other –

For losing? They made money by losing?

Yes. They made money by losing.

Can I get into some of these auctions? I’m happy to lose. [laughter]

Well, they had already put their $170,000 in to get all the way to that phase, right?

You need to have money to make money, I guess.

Exactly. And so they had recovered some of those funds. And moreover, they had earned money back from it. And there were a few companies that made quite a lot of money just doing that, and then they use that to fund the other TLDs that they bought.

Wow.

This round, that’s not going to happen. ICANN is going to get all the proceeds.

Oh, ICANN is going to get some of that money.

So if you know ICANN, they actually have a huge budget. I think their budget for this year is around $550 million.

$500 million – how many people is this, and what do they do?

I’m pretty sure they’re at least over a thousand people. So they run – not only they run the organization around the oversight of names, but it’s also numbers. It’s in their name, right? The Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Numbers. They also manage essentially IANA, and all of these IP address assignments. And what they do is it’s multi-stakeholder, so they really deal a lot with lots of different groups, from government agencies, from organizations, from corporations, from registries, registrars, from security groups… All these different parties, and they have to constantly get them together, both virtually and in-person, and try to negotiate the operation of the internet.

And so yeah, I think that was an example of something that I nerded out on, just these policy things. I don’t know, it’s just a nerd – I can go to any one of these events, whether it’s an event like that where it’s policy, or go to an event where it’s more technical, and I just feel at home there. And so going back to the original questions, “After 15 years, how can I still do this?”, it’s because after 15 years it hasn’t stopped being interesting, as technology, and as just a foundational part of the internet. I think that’s really cool.

What has changed in that time? Because I know DNS is kind of stuck in a certain degree where it is. There are movements to make some sort of secure DNS, and adding things… Obviously, Adam said one earlier, which is LetsEncrypt came around…

Yeah, that was a huge change.

..and that was probably huge.

Yeah, it was.

But if we set that one aside, what else is new or different in the world of DNS and managing DNS over the course of this business?

So I think if you ask anybody who operates DNS and in the DNS space, it’s just the scale at which we have to operate now… Because the internet has just continued to grow and grow and grow. And with the addition of the IoT devices that sort of started storming the internet 10 years ago or 15 years ago, and the growth of that, all of those things perform DNS lookups. They all have IP addresses. They all do these things that tax our systems. Plus, you have bad actors who have just gotten more and more power, who know that it’s a core part of the internet, and they try to attack it. So I think the scale has continued to grow over time.

On a technology point of view, I don’t think there’s been any major changes… If you look at the RFCs for DNS - there’s actually a website out there. I can’t recall off the top of my head what its name is, but I’m sure I could find it. And they collect together all of the RFCs, the requests for comments that underpin how DNS works. And that site list, if you go down – it’s continuously being updated, because every year there’s new RFCs for domains. Sometimes they fix old stuff, sometimes they clarify it… Recently, you’ve had a new addition, which is the – it’s called [unintelligible 00:31:54.07] HTTPS.

[00:31:57.04] This was an attempt to be able to do some routing things in the browser using DNS, at the apex. So being able to say “At the apex, we want to be able to terminate a name, with not an A record, but with something that actually points to another name.” We solved that problem years ago with the alias record, but this is actually a protocol standard way of doing it.

So I think things like that are what we see in the world of DNS, rather than big changes. Of course, you have people that have tried to do crypto names… That’s been a thing that folks have tried. It’s still being tried, by the way. I saw a new startup recently that got funded to try to do this again. It’s really hard though to change something that’s so foundational, and that works really, really well. I mean, when you look at it, DNS works fantastically well for what it needs to do.

Until it doesn’t, right? [laughs]

Until it breaks.

Yeah. It’s a scapegoat for all of our technical problems, right? It’s always DNS.

Yeah, it is. So we hear. I have a sticker somewhere around here that says that. It’s very cute. I don’t know where I put it.

Yeah, there’s a fan fiction story floating around out there where the villain of the horror movie you’re watching is DNS the whole time. [laughter]

That’d be a great twist ending, you know?

“It was DNS…! And it was in the house…”

It was DNS the whole time…

…the whole time.

DNS was floating inside the house.

So a fairly unchanged business for the most part, this 15 years. Would you say that’s fairly true?

I think so, yeah. I think that from a business perspective we have been able to stick to our core goals, because the industry as a whole has pretty much stayed very similar. Yes, there’s been slow improvements, but it hasn’t been any big changes.

Break: [00:33:49.23]

Do you try to grow a business like that? I mean, obviously you do, but you don’t seem like you’re – and maybe I’m wrong and this is a wrong assumption to it… Because you want to stick to engineers and that flow, and you resisted seeming like a registrar, which to me seems like free marketing. It’s like, okay, a lot of traffic coming here to just do domain lookups and they’ll probably buy from us, and then buy the services. It feels like a great marketing arm you’ve never leveraged, really. So how do you look at growth when it comes to a company that’s sort of just built on DNS, and provides a core service, and it keeps it simple? Have you grown a ton? How do you grow? What are your thoughts on that?

So we’ve never – aside from the very early days, we’ve never grown a ton. My CFO likes to call us DNReliable, because the growth rate is just so kind of steady. This is to say that’s exactly how – that’s fine, because that’s exactly what I wanted in a business. When I first started DNSimple, I very – again, I made a conscious choice. I said, “I don’t want to take other people’s money. This is not a business that’s going to be a rocket ship that if we throw dollars into it, it’s going to return tens of thousands of dollars”, it wasn’t the goal, “for each dollar we put in.” It was meant to facilitate the life that I wanted to have. I have four kids. They’re all – the last one is almost ready to graduate high school. And they were kids throughout the entirety of DNSimple, and the vast majority of time I was able to be there with them and for them, we were able to travel together, we were able to enjoy our lives together… They had all kinds of opportunities to do things because it wasn’t a business where I had to go “Oh, I’m going to spend 80-90 hours because I’m trying to help somebody else become rich.” I was already rich in time. And that was an essential part of the construction of the business.

We have grown though, and we continue to grow. So the way we grow, for example, right now is that – engineers are still our champions, but we’ve found ways to work ourselves into some enterprise-level contracts. And so we do that because there’s a lot of enterprises that are still on legacy software or legacy registrars that are really suffering. And so we go to them and we say “We can help you. We can help you on board, we can help move your domains off these other providers, we’ll do whatever it takes to get you on board. And once you’re with us, you’ll have a stable system and you can have a consolidated system.”

And then we built other software. One of the things we launched a year and a half, two years ago was what we call our domain control plane. The idea was that if you have some domains that you’re managing at, say, Route 53, or in Azure, you can actually connect from DNSimple to those services and see those domains and actually edit them and have bidirectional synchronization between DNSimple, Route 53, as your core DNS on-prem. And that’s cool. Like, that’s something we think that some of these folks that are running in legacy systems – or the reality of running enterprises is that you don’t have just one place where you put everything. You were talking about that earlier. Like, “How did we end up with four or five different registrars?” Well, that’s just business, baby. You are gonna get spread out, because as your company grows, you’re gonna have people off here doing something different than people off here, and their needs are gonna be different.

[00:40:05.09] So yeah, that’s how we’ve kind of facilitated the growth over the years. But we’ve never strived for massive, fast, rapid growth, because it just wasn’t in what I wanted to do, it wasn’t – I had done a little bit of that in the previous startups. I worked for LivingSocial as well for a little while, so I saw the good and the bad of trying to do that.

Is that still a thing, LivingSocial?

They do still exist. Both them and Groupon do still exist. Yes.

That’s true. Yeah, Groupon was the incumbent, and then LivingSocial came along and copy and pasted.

Challenged.

Yeah. The great thing about LivingSocial was it was actually – there were a lot of really good engineers who went to work there in the heyday. And they were writing stuff in Clojure, and in Ruby… And I swear, anything that would come – they were doing a lot of really, really interesting things. So there was this really great tech scene and space inside of LivingSocial by itself. Hundreds of engineers doing some really interesting things, and they were willing to try pretty much anything, and throw it at the wall and see if it stuck.

Wow.

So it was great fun. From business, I’m not sure I thought it was great, because you’ve got to actually make a profit at some point… [laughs]

Yeah… There is that. Is there any cool tech inside DNSimple?

I mean, I like our name servers. I’m a big Erlang fan, and our name servers are – the core of it is an open source Erlang name server that I wrote, and using, of course, other libraries from other folks that are much better Erlangers than I am… And so to me, that’s – I really love that. We basically have an umbrella app that sits on top of it, it adds some proprietary functionality, but the majority of it’s serviced by the open source stuff. And I find that to be really interesting.

And that stood the test of time? That’s been in there since the start, or when did you…?

Two thousand and I think fourteen, thirteen, somewhere around there… So it’s been there, yeah, for quite a long time. It’s not perfect, so there’s some things we’re trying to work on now… The downside to having a cool tech like Erlang is very few people know how to use it and write it. And so while I can love it, one of the lessons learned, of course, is that I may be alone in this boat for a while. So I’ve spent a lot of time writing Erlang code where it was just me and didn’t have anybody bounce ideas off. Now I have other folks who can pick up that and run with it a little bit.

That’s probably how you sleep well at night, right? Because of its ability to stay online, and…

Yeah.

Tell us more about the architecture, why Erlang’s cool. Go ahead and nerd out.

Okay, well… So fundamentally, DNS is cool because we can run it as an Anycast service, and this allows us to run a lot of redundant servers that are basically broadcasting the same IP address. So that’s part of what gives DNS its redundancy as a whole. And then inside of Erlang, you have – Erlang was essentially built along this idea that processes… So it has built-in process management. It really does wanna take over the entire machine. And those processes will die fast. So the whole goal was let something die fast, and then start another process if it needs to be recovered, rather than trying to keep something alive indefinitely. And so that helps a lot with its ability to recover. It’s basically fail fast recovery mode, rather than trying to just keep things going indefinitely.

What I really liked about it in the DNS side is that it has a particular syntax for basically converting binary data into internal data structures. They call it the – I think it’s the bit string syntax. And it’s just so elegant. Like, you can literally write out a packet and have it deconstructed into variables just right there in one line. And I always thought that was such a beautiful – including like the number of bits that’s gonna come out in this particular section. I just always thought that’s such an elegant and beautiful way to handle packets when you’re dealing at the network level. And it makes a lot of sense. I mean, Erlang was created for telecom. It was created for telecom switches, so they needed to be able to pack and unpack things pretty quickly.

[00:44:17.19] Have you looked into Elixir?

I have now. We actually – so I did a port of our Erlang name server from Erlang to Elixir, just for fun… And we had no intention of – we weren’t sure if we were gonna use it, but I wanted to see if it could be done. So I did a port of that and then made that open source as well. I’ve written a few little web doohickeys, nothing that ever saw the light of day in production in Elixir as well. We had some other team members who were big fans of it.

I actually prefer the Erlang syntax. I like the purely functional nature of Erlang, and I like the Prolog-like syntax of it a bit more. That’s me personally.

Sure.

But at the same time, Elixir has a lot of strengths. I was actually there when Jose first announced Elixir to the world at the Emerging Languages Conference at Strangeloop. This was back in – I can’t even remember when it was. But I sat there, watching him talk about Elixir and I was like “Man, this is gonna be really cool.” And it turned out to be pretty cool.

A lot of people really like it.

It’s very cool. Yeah, it’s funny, because I looked into Erlang probably way back when you were starting DNSimple, and took a few tutorials, and I just couldn’t get the syntax to stick into my brain… But I liked, for instance, the pattern matching that you’re describing, and a lot of the properties of it just seemed really smart. And I couldn’t quite get over the hump. And then when Elixir came out, it actually – because I was a Rubyist before that, and I knew Jose and everything, it all kind of connected. And so I’ve been writing Elixir for a long time, and enjoying some of the advantages of the BEAM, with a language that for me just more syntactically aligns with the way I think. But I think once you get past that, if you’ve written some Erlang for long enough, it’s like the matrix; you don’t even see the ones and zeros anymore.

It took me three tries before I could actually get Erlang. And in between the second and the third try, I learned Clojure. And learning Lisp, or a Lisp version was extremely helpful in getting me past that hump of what is a functional – how do I functional-language? And that was really hard. Like, that hurt my brain to get there. But when I finally got there, I was like “Ooh, this is actually really cool. Forget objects, objects are dumb. Let’s use functions everywhere.” [laughs]

I get you, I get you. I’ve been functional for a long time, but I’ve been thinking in objects lately. So I’m just kind of – I go back and forth, as the pendulum swings, you know…

Me too. I tease, but I’m totally back and forth all the time. [laughter]

How do you choose? Obviously, you make a choice, but is there an angst when you make the choice? You’re like “Man, I kind of miss objects”, or “Man, I kind of miss functions.”

Me personally? Do you want to answer this, Jerod?

I don’t know. I mean, I can tell you how I choose, but you’re the guest, Anthony. You tell him first. I’ll go next.

Usually when I select a language, I select the thing that is the easiest thing for me to use right now. So it’s purely of satisfaction of completing whatever it is I need to complete. And quite frankly, I almost always reach for Ruby first. And maybe that’s because I know Ruby really well. maybe it’s just because I find the Ruby syntax easy to drop back into after having not programmed for a while… But that’s what I typically jump to.

And I do often really feel the pain when I go in. I’m like “Oh man this, it’s boring to me now”, because I’ve written so much of it. I guess the way I got around that though was just stopping to write code for a while. And then every time I write code, I’m like “Oh, this is so fun”, until I get about five minutes in and it actually becomes hard. I’m like “Oh, this is hard.” [laughs]

[00:47:55.12] Yeah, I used to sit in code for six to eight hours a day, and now when I screen together a couple of hours, I’m exhausted. I’m like “Man, how do these kids do it nowadays?” Of course, the correct answer, Adam, is you don’t choose. You just vibe-code now. You don’t even have to choose.

That’s right. I forgot.

You don’t even look at the code. Just let the LLM figure it out for you.

I tried that the other day for the first time. I’ve been – I was pretty bearish on basically using generative AI for writing software… And the other day I was like “Okay, I’m just –” On a day off, on a weekend, I was like “I’m just gonna get the editor up and try to use just… Can it even run a Rails project?” I started a new, fresh Rails project. I was like “I want to run this Rails project. Just run the tests.” 30 minutes later, I still had not run the test, but it had installed a ton of software on my computer. [laughs]

Which is nice.

I vibed my way into, I don’t know, using up a bunch of space on my computer to have software, because it just couldn’t figure out what was wrong. It was hilarious. I think because I have a lot of old software built up on my computer for doing things, with like older versions of Ruby, and older versions of Rails, it just drove that thing crazy. So at one point I said to the LLM, I said, “You and me, buddy - it’s been fun, but we’re done for today.”

Not today.

Oh, see, Jerod? He’s kind. “We’re done, buddy.”

I’m sure he didn’t use those exact words…

He did! He [unintelligible 00:49:19.16] He was scared of the future LLM getting him. We’re vibing now, but we’re not vibing in the future…

That’s right. You better be nice to our robot overlords.

That’s right.

I was trying to get the new – so I’ve been testing everything, as you do… And the latest Google – what’s it called?

Gemini?

Yeah, but it’s like the latest one. I don’t know, I’m trying to pull up Zed right here…

Is it 2.5?

It’s called 2.5 something-something… Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental.

Nice…

It just got crowned the king of coding LLMs… Just temporarily, until the next release.

Yeah, until next week.

And so I’m like “Alright, Gemini, let’s see what you can do.” And it’s right in this function that I’m just like “This function sucks, dude. Do I have to teach you everything?” [laughs]

“This function sucks, dude…” [laughter]

I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the patience. I’m not here to code-review. It’s a give and a take. Some days I’m very happy, other days I’m like “You’re really bad at this.” I know, it’s not going to be long before it’s much better than I am… But for now, I still hold the high ground.

So you choose – how do you choose, Jerod? Did you answer that question, or did Anthony –

Well, I mostly was joking about vibe coding. How do you choose…? Yeah, you try to pick the right tool for whatever job you’re doing. So I agree with Anthony on that. That being said, sometimes the right tool is the one you know the best, even if it’s not exactly the right tool for the particular use. And so I will just pick things that are general-purpose. I like languages that are multi-paradigm. I like being able to do functional and object-oriented, and then I can kind of flow in and out based on what I’m up to. But I’m not going to lie - also, it’s just like personal style trends. You know, you do functional for long enough and then you get sick of just passing these bags of data around, and you’re like “I wish this object was smarter than it is.” Just a struct, effectively. And so you start going a little more object-oriented.

And throughout my career, I’ve changed the way I think code should look, the way I write it… I haven’t changed from tabs to spaces, but I’m sure eventually I could, and change back. If I could see it more often, I probably would. I just don’t have any sort of consistency, even as a human being. So it’s not logical, Adam. It’s just feels. I had to decide based on how I feel. And that’s about as true of an answer as I can give you.

That’s good.

I don’t know if it’s good or not, but that’s how it works.

Well, you can live –

It’s honest, [unintelligible 00:51:48.14]

Well, so I think - Anthony, to peel back one layer, Jerod will have to live in a world soon where he manages a Phoenix application, which is Elixir, and then a Rails application, which is Ruby. And so that’s obviously going to be different worlds, but similar worlds, where you have objects and you’ve got functions…

[00:52:11.16] Oh, yeah. Yup.

And I suppose you have to be left brain and right brain to do that, because that’s what’s required.

Context switching between languages is a skill. There’s no doubt about it. And it’s something you have to practice independent from writing software in general. We run three key languages. Our key core languages at DNSimple are Ruby, Go and Erlang. And the three of them communicate with each other every day. So Ruby is our Rails frontend, Go is kind of the glue that does messaging and shifts data from our core to our edges, and then Erlang that’s running on the edges to do the name service. And so we have to be able to run that entire stack. And if you really want to know how to get data from the customer’s hands all the way out to the namespace, the edge, you have to know all three of those languages. So it forces the team to, one, operate all three of those languages, which operate very differently, and two, actually be able to get in and understand and then make changes to those languages… Which also forces the team to ensure that each one of them along the way has the appropriate guardrails through tests and so on and so forth, to make sure that they don’t shoot themselves in the foot. And frankly, we haven’t always been great at putting in the test cases needed to ensure we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot. So we pointed the gun and pulled trigger and it happens, and then we have to go play cleanup. But it’s definitely a skill. Context switching is absolutely a skill.

How does that work out then, with you having that many, I guess – those three core languages; you said key languages?

Yeah, we could say essentially languages that have enough use at DNSimple that an engineer needs to know them, or at least if they’re going to run the whole stack. The answer is most of the engineers spend most of their time in Ruby. The vast majority of changes – the Ruby code, what the customers see, changes a lot faster. So it has the highest rate of change. The other two languages have a much slower rate of change. And so the reality is they don’t get constant practice. And then now what we’re trying to do is get it so that they can ensure that locally they can stand up the whole stack, so that they can get practice with each one of those things and make changes with each one of those things. If an engineer needs to do it every once in a while, most good engineers will be comfortable switching languages. They’ll be able to pick it up. It won’t be instantaneous, they’re not going to write the most idiomatic code, but they will be able to pick it up and do what they need at the most basic level with it. And especially if there’s good tests that they can run and ensure that whatever they’re doing doesn’t break things horribly.

What do you all look like operationally, in terms of observability, and deployment, ops, etc? Is it complicated? Is it simple? Do you sleep at night?

Oh, I sleep very well at night.

Who gets pinged? Are you on pager duty? etc.

So that’s a lot of questions. Let’s go. Let’s start. So I gave up the right to be on call when I stopped writing production code a couple of years back.

Okay.

So that’s good, from my point of view at least. It doesn’t mean that I don’t pay attention anytime that there’s an incident. And we have very well-documented incident handling policies. We have one person from the engineering team, and it rotates around the whole engineering team, that’s always on call. And then that person, if an incident starts occurring, they can basically – we have instructions. We have an incident channel in Slack, fire up a Google Meet, get whoever’s online right now, triage the incident. If you can’t triage it, then let it ping up everybody, and all engineers who are available or who are woken up can come in and try to fix it.

[00:55:59.09] We recently switched everything for deployment over to Nomad, which is HashiCorp’s technology for deploying containers out, essentially, in a well-orchestrated fashion. We also finally bit the bullet last year and the year before and started containerizing everything, so now we have pretty much everything containerized as well.

We deploy using ChatOps. So you can do all that type of stuff directly from within Slack. You can query our – we have tools, for example, to determine if particular domains are being hit harder, or what have you, get stats on things… And you can do that from ChatOps as well.

And then for observability, we’ve run everything through Datadog for many, many years. And so we have the ability to use Datadog to look at logs, to look at metrics… We don’t do APM level things, because it’s very expensive. There’s a large cost associated with it. So we do a lot of our analysis off of logs and off of just general metrics that we keep to determine – because the failure cases, most of them are fairly well known now, so we can alert based on commonly known failure cases for our systems.

How many of your headaches are due to bad actors? Are you at a scale that you have a lot of issues with that?

We don’t have a lot of issues, but I think many of our headaches do come from bad actors, intentional or unintentional. Unfortunately, I think that there are still folks out there that try to weaponize technology and use it to whatever ends they want to reach. And that’s unfortunate, because the internet was not originally designed for that. It was designed – it was a friendlier place in its beginning.

To share with your colleagues at university.

Exactly.

You’ve got any war stories, or like anything in particular, where things were under attack, or things that people abused, that you wouldn’t expect them to?

Unexpected abuse? We’ve had a few… So for example, one of the unexpected ones was the recent rise of takeovers.

So what happens is that if you register a domain and you point it at a DNS provider, and then that domain gets deregistered - let’s say you let it expire - and then somebody else picks it up, what they can do is they can go back to that same DNS provider, create an account, and then they can basically say, “Oh, that domain is still pointing at–” They could basically, not even let it expire. Let’s say you still control it, but you haven’t done anything, but you let that account lapse, and it’s still pointing at service… They can go to that service provider and spin up the DNS for it and basically do a full takeover. Because now they control the DNS, it’s pointed at it, and they’ll come in and they’ll say “Okay, now route email here.” And now they actually can start seeing what emails are being sent to that, or what web traffic, or whatever traffic they want to see. And so that’s one that I didn’t see coming, but actually is something that is fairly heavily discussed right now in the world of domains and DNS. It’s just this whole DNS takeover concept.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like a valid use, though. Like, is there a way to actually stop it? How are they gaining the privileges in the first place if they don’t –

Well, if you’re not going to use a domain, then de-delegate it. Don’t leave it pointed at a service that you’re not going to keep live. If you’re delegating it to a DNS provider like us, and you say “I don’t want that domain to be used there anymore”, then de-delegate it. Just take off the delegation completely. Or you can delegate it often to a sinkhole, basically someplace where it just goes and disappears, usually from the registrar. Or just turn it off completely. That’s the right thing to do. You shouldn’t leave things just – it’s kind of like if you leave the world not cleaned up… So think of software programming. If you leave memory, and you’re writing in a thing where you have to manage memory, and you don’t clean it up, you’re going to pay the price for that at some point.

It makes sense, I guess. You just assume – you know, maybe I started a business, got a domain for it, the business eventually failed, and you’re like “I’m done with that thing. I’m just going to let it expire.” And you just let it expire. That probably happens a lot, I would think.

[01:00:07.26] Yeah, I think if you let it expire, you don’t care about it, that’s maybe a little different. This is the case where folks hold on to a domain and they’re not letting it expire. That’s why I corrected myself earlier, I want to say. It’s not really the expiration part. They’re still holding the domain, but they’ve left it delegated somewhere else.

I see. So they still hold it, okay.

What was an example of – there was one recently where it was actually… I wish I could remember what it was. It was a pretty high profile case… I think it was for a registry for - one of the top level domains had something set up that they were using, and then they stopped using it, but they forgot to remove the delegations. And essentially, somebody started seeing traffic flowing through that was pretty useful for them to attack in another path. So it’s one of those risks where a lot of things have to kind of come together and create that perfect storm situation where it can be dangerous to you… But it happens, that’s the point. It happens, so you have to protect against it.

So we’re making changes, for example, on our side, when we have a domain that used to be with us, maybe, and then and somebody says “Oh, well, I want to own that domain” or “I’m bringing it back into DNSimple.” They have to prove – they have to basically make a proof and show that they actually have the rights to do that. It’s a rare case when it happens, but it does happen.

So that’s an example of an attack that I didn’t really consider. We actually have considered a lot of the more human attacks. So we have really strict protocols about how to deal with folks requesting changes to a domain that we can’t necessarily prove that they own, which is we don’t make those changes. And it happens. We get a fairly regular stream of people trying to say “No, no, I need to change this.”

Oh, another good one is – so I’ve got stories here. Another good one is when you have two people at a startup, for example, two founders, both using shared access, or both having access to an account, and they have a falling out. All of a sudden, one founder locks out the other one, and you as a domain provider get stuck in the middle of this fight and you’re just like “Wait a minute, you – just stop, people.” [laughter]

I’m not going to lie, I am logged in as Adam [at] changelog.com right now. So…

We actually just had this conversation - not this particular one, but like, “How do we even log into DNSimple?” Because - I mean, it’s been a couple of years for me. Jerod logs in more frequently. And I’m like “Do we have separate users?”

I hope you do.

Do we have accounts – we don’t have separate user accounts.

You should.

We do not.

We have a shared 1Password.

Boo… There’s no excuse for that. Come on.

What’s our excuse, Adam?

Honestly, I just never thought about it.

We probably pre-exist multiple users, maybe back when we set it up.

Yeah, that’s actually what I would be – since you were there so early, my guess is that you set it up that way, and you just left it, and it’s always worked for you, so why are you going to change it?

Yeah, exactly. We do have 2FA turned on, right?

That’s good. That’s good. That’s nice.

And we’ve never had a falling out.

Not yet.

[laughs] That’s right.

Come on, Anthony…

[unintelligible 01:03:19.23] this long. I mean, gosh…

Come on now… What are you trying to say here?

He’s trying to divide us over here.

He is trying to divide us now.

I would never do such a thing. [laughter]

Yet.

I just want you to be aware of the risks.

Okay –

Oh, the risks…

So who wins? If we come to you –

Yeah, how does it work?

How do you even – arbitrage? No, mitigate. How do you mitigate that?

So the thing is – you just said you logged in with Adam’s email.

I wouldn’t tell you that. But you already know that…

Yeah, but we know. No, it’s tough. It’s tough. If people get in a fight like that, often we say “Look, you need to resolve this yourselves. What we’re going to do is we’re going to make it so that domain can’t move.” So we’ll lock it, we’ll make it so nobody can make further changes to it, you’re not going to take it anywhere… But you need to resolve this amongst yourselves, by whatever means, and agree upon it, and then we can go from there.

So do you hear from an attorney? Do you hear from like law enforcement?

[01:04:17.18] Sometimes.

And so obviously, if they’re [unintelligible 01:04:19.16] whether it’s an attorney, or law enforcement, and they actually make a change, you weigh that against its truthfulness and make the change. If it’s –

We generally just don’t make the change. We say “Look, you you still have access to this thing.” So if they say “We have a court order” or “We have an agreement”, “Here’s a letter from an attorney where it’s agreed upon”, and both parties agree, then we will let it move forward, generally. Because we don’t want to stop it indefinitely. We understand that people need to get back to whatever it is they’re doing. But it’s not the kind of thing – we definitely dislike doing that. I’d rather not get in those situations. I’d rather that folks resolve their stuff amicably, but I know that’s not always possible.

I’m just thinking in that scenario very particularly, the one thing you would be asked to change would be to either change it back to the original email, if it was changed or “Oh, hey, I used X, Y, Z co-founder’s email for a long time, and I’ve never had my own, so therefore when they change it and I don’t have access to that anymore, I don’t have access to the service. So can you create me my own user?” Those are the kind of changes I can think you’d be asked to make… Versus like “Move my DNS from here to there” kind of thing.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a real tough sell to even get us to do that, because essentially, whatever condition the account was in before the incident happened, that’s what we’re going to be looking at as the baseline. Because you operated it that way for a long period of time, so that’s going to be what we’re going to say is like “Okay, that was the status quo. Then things started to change.”

And we’ve seen this happen. We’ve seen – then they’ll change emails, and then they’ll change it to somebody over here, and then they’ll change it to somebody over here… And unwinding that stuff is a nightmare. But it’s something that we’ve had to deal with a few times.

So you keep logs.

Oh, yeah.

You’re not deleting these records, you’re just safe-deleting.

We keep activity logs for pretty much all those types of actions to ensure that we have a history of it.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And those logs don’t go away if the account does or the user does.

Is it like a separate audit log, or is it just – like, how do you describe it? How would you describe it?

Yeah, right now we have an activity log for all accounts, basically. Each account has its own activity log. Every domain has an activity log. So we keep tracks of the kinds of changes that are happening on those different entities.

How frequent is this a concern for someone? Is there someone right now emailing you saying, “Hey–”

Probably not. It’s probably once or twice a year we’ll have some sort of contested case like this. Again, it’s not a huge – but we don’t operate… It’s imagine now if you’re operating at scale, at a company that’s running 150 million domains. That’s a massive amount of potential, let’s just say vectors of attack, areas where security becomes a real issue. And I can’t even imagine the kinds of systems they have to have in place to keep from doing the wrong thing.

Well, if you’re marketing is correct, I believe somewhere it said like 200,000, or something like that…?

In terms of domains under management?

Yeah, I believe it was something like that. I forget where I saw that at.

I think today we have close to that 200K registered domains. And I think we have a total of like 600,000 zones under management. Because again, we have the operational DNS side, we have the registrar side. Sometimes those two match up, sometimes they do not. Some folks only register domains with us, but use somebody else for DNS. More often, they just use it for DNS and don’t register domains with us.

Do you also sell certs?

[01:07:57.02] We do. So both LetsEncrypt - which we don’t really sell, we just… If you’re on the level of account, you can get the type of LetsEncrypt certificate that you’re allowed to. And then we also sell commercial certificates from Sectigo I think is what they’re calling themselves right now. And really, the key difference is the LetsEncrypt ones are all automated, and they have a really short 90-day window.

90 days, yeah.

And the other ones are like one year, but a lot less automation.

So I imagine LetsEncrypt was a disruptor for many people selling certs. Did it affect your bottom line? Were you selling way more certs and then it kind of dropped off, or not a big deal?

It wasn’t a huge deal, because we never sold a lot of certs. We didn’t really position ourselves as a company selling certificates, because it was just a side – it was kind of like how domain registrations were in the beginning. It was “Okay, we’ll add this functionality to support our operational folks, who want to manage their DNS, but also want to have their certificates as part of that.”

LetsEncrypt actually was a good thing for us, because it really fit into our thoughts about automation and how to automate all this infrastructure. And so for us, we loved it. We’re still huge fans. We’ve been financial supporters of LetsEncrypt now for, I think, 10 years. Since its inception, really; since the early days.

We are also fans, and have helped them get their message out there over the years. We had them on the show multiple times, and have just been beating the drum for years. Finally, somebody came around and solved one of the biggest gaps in the internet security space, and they made it too easy to say no. And actually, folks like you also integrating it into the web tooling and stuff so it’s just a click of a button, versus downloading the CLI bot, and running it yourself, and like cron-ing up your renewals… Because that’s really the big pain with LetsEncrypt, is the 90-day renewal. There’s got to be that process. And so we all had to run it on our remote machines, but… So the infrastructure is there now, and they sure changed the – they changed the world of the Internet.

Absolutely.

And it’s cool.

It’s very cool.

What a success story.

I am very happy that they came into existence and they’ve done such a good job of stewarding this certificate provider, certificate authority. I think it’s been really fantastic to see.

Break: [01:10:15.16]

So what’s burgeoning? What’s new? What’s next? Can you share some of these TLDs, these secret new ones? Are they out there? Are they published?

No, it’s too early in the process. All of us who are interested, are waiting for the handbook, which is going to be this document that’s going to explain the process for how to get a new TLD…

Okay.

I don’t suspect we’ll see anything until 2026 probably.

It’s too early for that, but certainly, there’s things coming down the pipeline that ICANN’s talking about, or that the DNS luminaries are trying to get done… What’s out there?

So they’re in the middle of trying to make improvements around the transfer process, to transfer domains from one registrar to another. That’s still kind of tedious in many cases, especially when you do it at bulk. So there’s a whole set of guidance coming out that’s in policy changes that are going to be worked through in this next year, that are really about making that transfer process a little simpler, a little bit easier to start and finish, and ideally to be able to do that same thing even if you’re dealing with large portfolios of domains. That’s, I think, one of the big things coming of ICANN. There’s always a lot of talk about security.

DNS abuse is a big thing right now. So there’s a lot of push to rein in the use of domains for things like phishing, and for copyright infringement, and for all kinds of other nasty things that happen on the internet… And that has to be a global effort, because if just one TLD works on it, it gets shifted somewhere else. If only one country works on it, it gets shifted somewhere else. So it has to really be a global effort. So there’s a lot of talk about DNS abuse and improving policies. The whois protocol got basically deprecated.

Oh yeah, it’s gone.

Yeah, it’s gone now.

What’s the new one called?

RDAP.

RDAP.

Yeah.

And why? I mean, whois is such a cool word. [laughs]

It was a cool word. But as a protocol, it was pretty basic. It was just like a “Here’s a chunk of text.”

Exactly.

And that chunk of text was never standardized… It was like pseudo-standardized by the biggest players.

You just get good practice at your regular expressions, you know?

Exactly.

Extract the important parts, please…

So RDAP basically said “No, no, we need more structured data. We need access control.” So for example, certain levels of access need to be given to registrars, that don’t need to be given to consumers, generally. Certain access needs to be given to registries that maybe registrars don’t have access to. Certain access needs to be given to law enforcement, right? So there’s all kinds of things that have to happen, and I think that was one of the major changes that kind of evolved over the last seven or eight years.

Yeah. And RDAP’s been out there, I read. It’s just now they’re actually deprecating whois. Like, they kind of were available simultaneously for a while.

Correct.

And just people didn’t know about it, and now they’re starting to actually put it out there. Stop using whois, start using RDAP.

Yup, yup. That’s kind of how things work when you’re talking about having to move from some legacy protocol to what we’re going to use. It has to be a really slow conversion.

[01:15:57.10] Certainly.

That’s something we know very well. When we make changes, often it will take us a year, two years to fully realize that change, just because there’s so many factors involved and we don’t want to break things for our customers.

Speaking of… IPv6. Is that a big thing nowadays yet?

I mean, it’s definitely grown in usage. I know that the last… So we run IPv6 internally for a lot of the routing from our edge servers. Our architecture basically has edge caches that sit in front of our origin servers for DNS… And so we run IPv6 internally for a lot of that.

We did find that in some areas IPv6 isn’t supported well enough to be able to route it correctly every time. So latency would become an issue, because it was being routed through so many different routers to try to find a path.

Interesting.

Or there just wasn’t a path. Like, there was just no path. Hey, there’s no router –

There’s gotta be a path eventually, right?

Not necessarily. There were certain cases where there was no way to route. And I don’t know if it was temporary or what have you, but it became an issue. But I think we’re on the cusp of needing to have it, so I expect at some point we’ll see it come the de facto standard for new addresses.

Well, I was in college in 2004. I recall my teacher saying IPv6 is rolling out, baby. And I was like “What’s this?” Because they were teaching us IPv4. And they’re “This knowledge is going to be useless soon, because everything’s going to be going to IPv6.” And so I was very much expecting it. And I’m still using those IPv4 addresses. And I think a lot of the adoption is – okay, obviously, NAT changed things… Because they didn’t see NAT coming, where everybody would be behind a shared IP, in a local network. And that really delayed it. But I think the other thing that honestly has delayed it so long is like “Dude, those addresses are just too long. Like, we don’t like them.” Right?

[laughs]

I mean, is that too basic? I think it might be part of it…

I can’t remember IPv6. I mean, you can put it in front of me 17 times…

You can’t remember that?

Yeah, but really, should you be remembering IPv4 addresses either? Come on…

[laughs] Well, how are you going to SSH into your Plex server, you know?

You’re hurting me right now. [laughter]

The truth hurts, man. The truth hurts.

Well, how do you do it?

I don’t SSH into my Plex.

Okay…

Well, I do think there are sometimes funny, weird explanations for why things do and don’t take off. I think PHP is a great example of like something that took off for a reason that nobody would have planned, which is like dead simple execution. I mean, really.

Deployment. PHP deployments. It was FTP into a server.

That’s right. Change the .html to a .php and now it’s dynamic. I mean, that is why PHP is what it is. The language itself, all kinds of problems etc. It’s better now, I know. No shame, PHP people. But I honestly think that a lot of the IPv6 holdout is because it’s just ugly and we don’t like it. And so I’m gonna have to be dragged to change it.

It’s possible.

Is it the colon in there? Or what is it that gets you? What is it that makes it – like, describe ugly, Jerod. Visually, with your hands, and everything.

Just look at it. I don’t know how to describe it to you. It’s like that judge who says “Describe porn on the internet. You know it when you see it.” It’s like that – everybody knows what ugly is, and obviously it’s subjective, but I don’t hear anybody disagreeing with me when I say it’s ugly. They’re like “Yeah… IPv4 is better.”

Like your robot overlords, you need to accept your hexadecimal overlords, okay?

[01:19:57.24] Yeah… Well, I’ll accept it when they force me to. Just like with the robots. I’m not gonna accept them until they make me…

I just see it as an opaque thing, and ideally I want to automate it all the way. So in my ideal world, as devices inside of a managed network come on, they should just automatically get names based on whatever your configuration management has set up. So if you’re using – whether it’s a configuration management like Terraform or something, Ansible, whatever it is, that should all happen together. I don’t have to think about this stuff.

I agree.

And when we get to that point, then IPv6, IPv4 - you don’t care as much about it anymore.

Yeah, I mean, it should be an implementation detail that lives at layer three or whatever, and I should never have to look at layer three. I completely agree with you. But we still have to every once in a while, because how else are you going to SSH to your Plex server?

[laughs]

Adam?

Uhh… You know, the way I do it is –

You use local DNS, don’t you?

Can I just introduce you to a WireGuard protocol, please, and stop doing what you’re doing?

[laughs]

Okay, let’s talk about that then, because that’s what replaced it for me. So for a while there, I would assign particular IP addresses to particular machines. Now, this is home lab stuff. So this is not enterprise, this is home lab.

Yeah, we’re just at our houses, watching Plex.

Yeah, the rulebook’s out. I mean, unless you’re like home labbing to be enterprise, and that’s a different story than rulebook’s back in. But in my case, I would have certain machines I would give a certain IP address to, and I would remember, “Okay, this subnet is .100, versus whatever”, whatever it might be. And so I would remember the IP address pretty easily, because it’s the IP address for the home. And then it’s just – the last three, where is it at in this grand scheme of things, in this network? And now because I use Tailscale, and because Tailscale is really installed on everything, it gives it a network-friendly name that is accessible via search. And so when you set up Tailscale for every new machine, when you do SSH-blah, it’s going to search on the Tailnet for a machine named that. So if I SSH into Cineplex, for example, which is my Plex machine, it’s named. It now has a name on the Tailnet, and so SSH into it is just like really just too easy now.

But do you know his IP address?

Yeah, I don’t know that stuff. I mean, if I wanted to…

But you could memorize it if you wanted to.

Well, no. To go one layer deeper, my Raycast setup plugs right into Tailscale. So if I needed to know which IP address was anything, I could just use Raycast to conjure which machine via Tailscale, and just copy it to my clipboard and paste it wherever. So I don’t ever have to remember anything, or even look it up. It just comes to me.

It’s like Neo and the Matrix. I know Kung Fu.

Yeah.

I love it.

What do you think? Anthony, does that pass your test? Is that WireGuard enough for you?

Yeah, I feel that’s good enough. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you.

Good job, Adam. Well done.

He’s not literally typing in… I come from the days where we used to put all of our local machines in our Etsy hosts, you know?

I know… [laughs]

I’m not going to put ee:1f:92::. It’s just not going to –

It’s not gonna do it.

[unintelligible 01:23:04.08] with that stuff.

Okay, you’re supposed to be shaking your fist at the cloud right now, while you’re doing this, Jerod. Come on. [laughter]

I’m just trying to explain how simple human reactions are sometimes. And I hope that it someday occurs, because I agree with you, we should not have to think about this stuff. And most of us don’t have to, most of the time. I haven’t actually SSH-ed into a Plex server probably ever. I was representing Adam.

Yeah.

Okay, where do we go from here? The future. We’re looking at the future.

Yeah, we’re looking at the future. So LLMs and Gen AI is on a lot of people’s minds, obviously.

How can you use that with DNS? Is that a possibility?

[01:23:43.04] Well, I mean, there’s – the generative part of it is not so interesting. The the part of it of Machine learning from the amount of data that we get could be interesting, but we don’t have enough capacity, in terms of as a company we’re small enough where we haven’t said “Oh, well, let’s apply machine learning to all the data coming through.” But I think it’s feasible. And our team is looking into how they can use it to do their job better without putting things at risk.

So that’s definitely something that at least it’s on our mind. It’s one of our objectives this year, is to figure out the place of generative AI at DNSimple… If it even has a place other than for internal use.

It’s the right question. The answer could be no, but –

The answer could be no…

…as they become more capable, it probably fits in somewhere.

But I think I think, for example, an example of something that – when I finally started using it a little bit more, and I said, “Okay, this is an interesting use case”, is we implemented the ability to export your domain lists recently, as a CSV file. It seems like a silly thing, right?

Yeah.

It should be pretty straightforward. But what happens if you want to just search through your domains and you want to filter based on things, you want to have rule sets, and those rule sets you want to have the flexibility to be able to not have to actually like set up all the interface for every field that you might want to search on, and all that. So traditionally, you might use a search – like, off the shelf search tooling. But frankly, generative AI might be a place where that could be used. And more importantly, it might be able to take the context of the rest of the internet and be able to use that at the same time. So this is an area where I feel like it could be interesting, but we’re definitely still at the “Let’s make sure we have a safe use policy. Let’s make sure we’re not going to put any customer data at risk before we even start trying the implementation.” Because there’s so many unknowns, and it’s moving so fast. So, so fast.

LLaMA 4 just dropped, or is dropping, which has a context window of, I believe, 10 million tokens. And so that’s making things like what you just described way easier, because you don’t have to do any sort of fine-tuning, you don’t have to do RAG… You can literally – obviously, it’s pre-trained on the internet, and you can drop so much information into the prompt, and just go from there.

A good example of what one of our team members did as an experiment was he was looking at a list of domains, and he said “Just summate and like count the number of top-level domains that are in this.” Now, what’s interesting about top-level domains is they’re not always one TLD. Sometimes they could be – they’re considered top-level. For example, co.uk. UK is the top-level domain, but a lot of people consider co.uk. So now you have the context of “Do you want it with that or without that?” And he wrote a Ruby script initially to do all this filtering, and then he said “I wonder if I could use a gen AI to ask it to do this same type of stuff for me”, and it understood the context of what the internet thought as top-level domains and helped him do that far faster. So that kind of opened my mind to the potential and the possibility for using generative AI. Leaving aside for a second all the challenges with it, the potential is there to do something super-interesting.

Where I would see the use of an LLM might be in configuring or hypothetically configuring something. So maybe reconfiguring my DNS, or maybe adding a new service. Rather than clicking the one click, maybe it’s a prompt box that says “I want to add support for this service.” And then the UI comes back with “This is the change I can propose to make to your DNS. This is what’s going to be added. This is what’s going to be subtracted” etc, where it’s more of a natural language driven option to a user, potentially. I don’t know. I mean, you’ve got a lot of nerds and engineers, maybe they want that less… But sometimes, especially as you get in enterprise, maybe you need to offer something that’s a bit more just flexible, maybe. Natural language, you know, for configuration.

[01:27:59.19] I have no doubt that we’ll see tooling around Ops that’s going to be context-aware of the entire corporate network, and then will use that context awareness to suggest where configuration should go, where improvements should go. When new systems get added, it can basically just go “This system goes here.” No need to write code to configure this, whatever that looks like, because it’ll just do that for it. And initially it’ll be in your editor. Like, the engineers - that’s what they have right now. Think about it. Their editor has this thing that’s helping guide them through this. And if you take away the syntax of the editor, but still have some visibility into what that model is going to do before you apply it, I think you could take away a lot of the complexity of managing some of those enterprise networks.

So I imagine we will see services starting to take advantage of this pretty soon, until – it’s going to happen, and there’s going to be some very funny and not so funny incidents that are going to be due to choices made to use this type of tooling as well. Beyond that, I’m trying to think if there’s anything super-interesting I see coming out. I mean, the internet’s kind of due for a shakeup, right?

I think o.

Cryptocurrency has become normalized now, right? Crypto is normal.

Pretty normal.

It’s traded on the stock exchange under certain funds, right?

That’s right. There’s actually ETFs where you can buy Bitcoin and ETH, I believe.

So what’s the next shakeup? Is this it? Is this where we’re at? Or is it something that we haven’t seen coming yet? I don’t know. I love being a futurist sometimes, but I’m not very good at it.

Well, it’s hard, because none of us know the future. So… [laughter]

Well, something obvious here - none of us know the future, by the way.

Yeah.

That is pretty funny. I was still thinking about interesting uses of LLMs on your thing… Where I could even describe what I’m trying to do, and domain names get suggested…

Yeah, I actually had a friend who built something like that, who did it. So the funny part about suggesting domain names isn’t coming up with the words to put together, to string together and suggesting. It’s actually determining if they’re available.

Yeah, if they’re available. Yeah.

Because there’s really, really strict limitations at most registries about how many times you can send a query, “Is this available?” In some cases, absurdly small limitations. So for example, there are registries who let you open two synchronous connections for your entire… And that’s it.

Oh, my goodness.

You have to somehow fit everything you’re doing through – and they’re stateful connections. So we’re not talking stateless. They’re freaking too stateful. So one of the things that’s being developed right now is a new version of the protocol that registrars use to connect to registries, based on actual REST and state transfer through the entire packet, so that you don’t have to run into these situations where you have to keep a long-lived connection opened, because it just doesn’t scale up to the level that people need to operate at.

When that happens, and when that starts getting deployed at some of the registries and registrars, I have a feeling that it’ll be a lot easier to add search in, because it’s not the suggestion part, it’s the checking part that’s really, really hard. Another tidbit from working in this industry for far too long…

That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have thought about that. It’s just – yeah, old school tech holding you back, you know?

Yeah, yeah. You’d think it would have been fixed by now, but nope.

But no. Well, the incentives aren’t there.

Yeah, I just wonder… You know, I know that you’re enjoying this chill biz you’ve got going on here. And not saying that a domain lookup would make it any less chill, but that’s the area where you have not wanted to explore, to keep things the way they have been. But I just wonder if there’s…

I hear you, Adam. Adam, I hear you. I see you, Adam. The message has been received. I think I know what Adam wants me to work on next. [laughs]

[01:32:02.06] I’m just trying to hypothesize here on a podcast, you know? Just saying… You know, best time to fodder it out. Let’s do it.

Right. Here, I’ll make a deal. If your podcast listeners flood me with requests to do this, I will know that they will agree with you, and I can tell the team “Look, we have an incentive. Look at all these Changelog listeners who really want us to do this.”

Well, I mean, I think our dollar spent alone should be some indicator, right? I mean, we’ve been a diehard customer for years, and none of that money has gone to you. And I would probably venture to say – I haven’t done the math, but probably thousands.

Thousands spent, of which I would maybe see 5% to 10% of that. Because I’m giving the rest of it to the registries. This is the part about that part of the business. It’s kind of lopsided. All the innovation is happening at the edges, at the registrars, and all of the money is getting sent to the core, at the registries. It doesn’t really create a great environment for innovation, and it’s one of the reasons why we continue to see stagnation, I think, in it. It’s because the money’s going to the wrong place.

How do you become a registry? If you want to become a technical registry operator, there’s some pretty stringent requirements that you have to fulfill with ICANN to get permission to do that. And then it’s just like any other business, you have to convince TLD holders - so the registry operators are the ones that actually own the rights to a TLD - to come switch to you. So you have to prove that you have the stability to do this, and you have to be involved in all the things at the policy level, at the technology level, to prove that you can actually stand up to what they have to deal with.

That is kind of a whole different business, though, that you’re running, though. It’s like, now it’s customer support, in a lot of cases.

On a technical level it’s not that different, though.

It is, because – it’s different because it’s even deeper at the core. So in other words, if I’m going to go – who do you think gets attacked most often? It’s going to actually be the people operating the registries, because if you take them down, you can take the entire team. And some people just want to watch the world burn, right? So they will specifically… They’re under attack constantly, every day, all day. I’m sure all the registry operators are – that’s the area where they have to focus, and that’s what makes it… I jest a little bit about the money’s going to the wrong place. The money’s going where it goes because there is a lot of responsibility that they have to continue the operation of the internet. The buck stops with them, on that TLD; if something goes down, it impacts a large swath of the internet. For any TLD. Even the smaller TLDs. A lot of people would be impacted. Just imagine for a second running the .com top-level domain. Just imagine what it entails. It blows my mind every time I even start to think about it, because it’s so fundamental to how the world works today.

Yeah.

If you take it down, you take it all down.

Oh, yeah. And imagine, none of what we do is possible. Everything would stop.

Maybe the better question for me to ask, rather than trying to force you into becoming a place I go look up domains, and then tell you how AI applies to it and attract you to it… Maybe the better angle is - or a different angle, really - how do you market seemingly boring domain services, that are very stable? As you said, your co-founder said DNStable, not DNSimple. Or DNStable kind of thing. How do you market this bespoke, kind of unique features that you offer to the world effectively? Because I would feel like the one thing would be great marketing, but maybe the loss there is not good enough. How do you market it?

[01:35:55.17] So we – again, we focus a lot on positioning, and how we use our words. We get a lot of benefit from things like SEO. We’ve followed along as the trends have started to change and make sure that we’re good at optimizing for gen AI tooling. So a lot of people are starting to get their search results, if you will, from ChatGPT, or from Perplexity, or what have you… And those require a different set of – a different set of basically things you feed into them to ensure that you get placement. And so we’ve been doing things like that and making sure that our materials are both instructional, and accessible, and machine-accessible as well. And I think that’s one of the ways that we’ve done it from a technical level. But really, it comes down to positioning who we want to go after, and then making sure that our website, our messaging when we’re out at events, the way team members talk with other folks, the way the community talks about us - that those things kind of all come together to guide those folks having a specific problem that we solve, to come to us, when there are some really big alternatives out there.

Yeah.

So yeah. I mean, I know how we do it. I’m not going to say we do it exceptionally well, but we do it well enough to stay in business and continue that slow growth. But the competition is fierce, on both sides; on the operational side and on the domain side. But especially on the domain registration side. If you’re into looking at keyword prices and things like that on advertising, go look at some of the keywords around domain registration. They’re some of the most expensive keywords in the world, because the competition is just fierce. And those companies are buying Super-Bowl ads; they’re competing at that level. We can’t compete at that level, so we have to instead compete at a level that’s more appropriate for us.

What you do is you find out where they’re filming the Super-Bowl ad, and somehow you put a dude or a person in the behind the scenes with a DNSimple shirt on, and then you get on –

And you photobomb it?

Yeah, that’s how you get in there. The freebie.

That would be hilarious.

You know, that’s how you get in there.

That’s one of the reasons why we give out a lot of shwag, is we’re hoping we’ll have like an accidental photo bomb in somebody else’s advertising one of these days…

There you go.

It hasn’t happened yet, I don’t think, but I’m hoping.

One day.

Send me some swag. I’ll wear it on the show.

That’s right.

Easy button.

You ask, I will give.

Alright.

Two shirts, please.

Two shirts, please. [laughs]

I just need to know your size. So someone email the sizes afterwards, so we know what it’s going to be.

Too easy. We’ll do it.

Too easy.

Yeah, I was even trying to google, like “How in the world –” I mean, this is the one thing I’d probably google. “How do I find DNSimple, to know I need DNSimple?” Is it DNS hosting? Is it managed DNS? Like, what exactly is – I mean, I’ve been a user for so long I don’t even know what you are, basically. I don’t even know what you are.

I think a lot of folks do look for DNS hosting. I think that’s a big one. I think a lot of people are looking for a solution with a good API. And we do fairly well there… For clear reasons, because as engineers, we’ve focused a lot on building an API that is reliable, easy to understand, well-documented. And I think that brings in a decent amount of traffic as well. Even if those folks don’t use the API, a lot of engineers just like to know it’s there, so that the day they do need to use it, they can.

Yeah.

But I hear you, Adam. I feel you. I see you.

[laughs] He’s going to go work on this feature.

I really don’t know if – I’m on the fence. I don’t know if it would improve your business based on what I know about it. It would probably just be more headaches. If it were me, the way I would consider it isn’t because it was my dream to host the place someone goes when they have an idea, to figure out which domain to buy… That would be cool as a standalone thing. But I think I would do it, if I were in your shoes, if it raised the bar of my awareness… And even if I only broke even on the registration thing, does it help me address a bigger market? Because more people come to me. And there’s lots of enterprises out there, and you’ve already crossed that chasm from engineer to enterprise… So you’re looking to get other customer types in there. To me, that would be one way you do it. It just draws more awareness.

[01:40:24.27] And I see where you’re coming from with that. I think, as you pointed out, there are a lot of things that happen when you open up to a different audience that are unforeseen consequences of any choice like that. And we have to weigh those choices against what our goals are as a business. We’re constantly doing that. We’re constantly saying, “If we make this choice, is it going to be overall positive, negative? Do we have any idea?” And we run a lot of experiments and we’ll probably keep running a lot of experiments as well, just to see if we can change things in a positive direction. So like I said, I hear you, Adam.

You hear me. You hear me.

He hears you and he sees you.

What is the coolest thing you’ve learned about, I suppose, in the world, that – because you operate this managed, hosted DNS, what are some of the coolest stories that you would have never had if you didn’t run this business?

That’s an interesting question. There are stories about characters in this business who have built up these massive domain portfolios, and sold them. That’s just so weird. Like, there’s so much weirdness there. People that have made tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, that you’d never know unless you’re in this industry. Stories of being blocked out of countries completely at the DNS level. We actually had that happen to us at one point.

Which country was it?

Kazakhstan. It was so weird. It was great. I laugh at this, but it’s just such a bizarre story. I got an email directly to me one day, which looked like – it was all lowercase, and it was like “You need to take down this site or we will shut you off. This is illegal in Kazakhstan.” And it was from an email address – it was like a kz email address, but it wasn’t a government address, or anything like that. I was like “This is really weird.” I was like “Well, we have a very clear policy about taking things down. Here it is.” And he’s like “I don’t care about your policy. I’m taking you down.” And sure enough, a couple of days later, we had some folks who were like “It’s really weird. We have customers in Kazakhstan who are not seeing our site now.” I was like “Holy crap. That was real?”

“That was real!”

“It was DNS…!” [laughter]

It always is…

See…?!

And it took me two years to get us back in Kazakhstan. And I don’t even think – like, I tried reaching out… And eventually I reached out and one day we were just back. Because that site that was their problem had left on their own accord, obviously, once getting blocked, within like 60 days. But they didn’t care at that point. So weird stuff like that. It just doesn’t happen unless you operate in these types of spaces. The domain and DNS space is just – it’s just been weird. It’s great fun, but it’s such a weird space.

Well, I’ve enjoyed this conversation, Anthony. Is there anything that we haven’t plumbed the depths of DNS, or DNSimple, or Anthony Eden that you’ve been waiting for us to ask, that we just haven’t asked yet?

No, I think – I’ve enjoyed it as well. I love nerding out about this stuff. That’s the thing. I don’t know. I’ve learned a lot along the way, and I’ve probably forgotten more than a lot of people ever know about this space. It’s just always fun to talk about it, so thanks for having me on to do it. I appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you. We appreciate your time.

It’s been fun being a customer all these years.

If you ever need anything… Seriously, one of the things that we always do is everybody on the team watches our support inbox. And so if you have a technical problem, an engineer will get to it. If you have a non-technical problem, it could come to me. It could come to sales. It could come to marketing. It depends.

So don’t hesitate to reach out. And this goes for anybody who’s a DNSimple customer, or who is even considering becoming one. We’re here because we service y’all, and we like doing it, and we’ll keep doing it because we actually care about what our customers want.

Very cool.

Well, I’m going to go open a support request and I’m going to put my T-shirt size in there and hit Send, and see what happens.

I know who that’ll go to.

[laughs]

I’ll fast-track it to the right person.

Alright.

Awesome. Thanks, Anthony.

Alright, thank you both. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Anthony.