New web infrastructure

As part of my move to update this blog, I have moved to a completely new webinfrastructure and gone from a self-hosted configuration on a dedicated server to shared system.  Self-hosted has worked well, but the difficulty of maintaining and upgrading server hardware has become too difficult.  I am happy to have someone else deal with the foibles of running a webserver and associated networking equipment.  Here are my current service providers.

Blue Host – I am using them as my webhost and have been happy with them.  Their customer service is good and it is rare to find a company where you can reach an actual person with minimal hold time.  Best of all, their prices are reasonable and they offer unlimited storage and bandwidth.

EveryDNS – This company is hosting my DNS.  I have been happy with them in general although I currently have an issue with one of my domains.  Part of the difficulty is that they have recently been acquired by DynDNS and it appears that support is in transition.

DomainMonster – These guys are my domain registrar and I have been very happy with them.  Their prices are reasonable and their service is first rate.  You can call them too and they will answer.  They are also prompt with their web-based response.  I also used their DNS services on my domain that is having issues with EveryDNS and everything worked smoothly.

Google Apps – I use this service to host my email and calendars.  I have a very positive experience with Google Apps so far and am impressed with the reliability and robustness of the offering.  Best of all, the price is free!  It also takes advantage of many of the Google applications already available for a wide variety of PDAs thus allowing you to synchronize your email, contact and calendars transparently.

I performed extensive research before choosing each of these options and so far am quite happy with each of them.

Support from a not quite free service

I realized a ways back that I needed a third party to provide secondary DNS services for my domain and researched many optins and eventually settled on EveryDNS.com. I liked the robustness of the service and the price, free! Of course, they asked for donations and I was happy to provide one for their valuable service.

EveryDNS(ED) has since been acquired by DynDNS(DD) and my needs have changed and I switched to using ED/DD as my primary DNS host. This has worked flawlessly except for one domain. It appears that I ran into a bug with their system and they are not providing accurate DNS results. This is a problem and brings the question.

ED/DD provide technical support, but the response email states that it could take 4-6 days to respond. I can understand slow response on a free service, but I did pay for the service. To make matters worse, the issue at hand is clearly a bug in their system. At this point, I am frustrated waiting for them to respond and my website is having difficulties. Given that I paid, I think that I deserve a better response. Am I being unreasonable with this request?

One final note, my name registrar provides DNS services and so I moved the domain to them temporarily while ED/ED resolves the issue. This solves my problem, but does not resolve my my annoyance.

5/10/10 Update: The DynDNS Twitter team responded to my tweet on this topic.  They were helpful and highly responsive and resolved the problem on the same day!  Kudos to the DynDNS Twitter crew.