whats the plot

i guess this can't be considered backbiting, since i am not going to mention any names here. but today, something happened that really made me upset.

i was working on some sites with someone, and he uses dnsmadeeasy for their dns (an excellent service, btw). as time went on, i made my own sites that were in some way affiliated with this individual. he insisted i use his dns account, gave me the username and password for it. this was more than a year and a half ago.

a year ago, in january 2007, i logged in only to find that the account would expire in a few days. not being sure where this person was, i went ahead and renewed the account for a year. all was good and fine. in december 2007, i emailed this person and asked him if he was going to pay for january 2008 or if i should. he said he would pay.

today, i remembered this, and so i logged in just to check, and found the account had expired on january 9th. i tried to renew the account, and found a ~$8000 charge on the account! normally, the account costs around $60/year for a huge number of domains. the $8000 was for some support package that they wanted to be added to the purchase. i couldn't remove this no matter what i tried, so i called up the company.

i told them that this person was overseas and asked me to renew (he really is overseas), and that i was wondering what the $8000 was there for. they looked into the account, and said, "your friend knows why there is an $8000 charge, that's why he asked you to log in and pay from within the states." -- "huh? i don't understand?" - "i believe your friend was one involved with dos attacks that affected our servers, this happened between him and some other islamic sites..."

i was shocked... i told the representative that i was sharing the account with the person and had some of my own sites on there and asked whether i could move them to another account. he said that they probably would not want to have any sites associated with this guy's account on any account in their system.

they told me they'd investigate and notify him via email of what their investigation leads to. the representative advised me to move my dns before their service cuts off. so i spent the afternoon changing ~7 or so domains to point to dreamhost's dns server until i figure out if there is a better option.

so why am i angry? because if i hadn't, by luck, checked this site today, my sites would have all gone down (some of which are quite high traffic sites) for a few days and i may never have noticed it. this guy knows i use the dns with him, and knows i paid for it the last year, and i just reminded him in december... if he knew there were problems, why didn't he either 1. resolve them, or 2. tell me and give me a heads up so that i can move the sites without losing them?

it just seems like a common courtesy to me, or am i wrong?

plus, what's this about dos attacks that hit their servers if they're just dns servers? i am not quite sure i follow... does that just mean that people just sent an influx of requests to the website at once and that registered as a dos attack on the dns server because the requests were going through them, or what could have happened? and why did the rep say, "your friend knows what he did..." and what is this about these dos wars happening between other "islamic sites" and how does this rep, who just works at dnsmadeeasy, know this?

i am confused and upset... i might try to call dnsmadeeasy again tomorrow and see if i can convince them to let me move the subset of my domains that i use to a different clean account or not, as dnsmadeeasy was an excellent service; that and i am not sure if dreamhost will get upset or not at the influx of requests hitting their dns servers for my more popular sites.

Tags: dns, rants

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 7:51 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.