From Two Day Outtage — Dynadot Recovers

Domain registrar’s web site down for two days due to hardware failure.

Domain name registrar Dynadot is recovering from a hardware failure that took dynadot.com offline for two days. Webhosting, dns servers, website forwarding, parking, and email forwarding were not affected.

In an email to clients, Dynadot president Todd Han explained:

…Although we had prepared for such a situation by using redundant hardware and performing frequent backups, when it actually happened it took us longer than expected to recover. During this time I was 100% focused on getting the site back up, and neglected to inform you, our clients, what was going on. Those of you who were upset regarding this lack of communication are completely justified, and I apologize.

This is the first major hardware failure we have ever experienced in our 6 years in business, and we have learned some good lessons. In the coming months we plan to redesign our infrastructure to further increase the fault tolerance of our systems. Secondly, we plan to develop “dynadot.info” to be a system status website hosted at a different data center. This site will have alternative ways to contact us, and a frequently updated blog if our systems ever go down again.

When you run as many servers as we do, and are growing as fast as we are, hardware problems become a “when” rather than a “if”. We promise to improve our handling of these situations from now on.

Dynadot is one of the 50 largest domain registrars with over 300,000 domains registered as stated by RegistrarStats.

Dynadot clients seem to have two major concerns as stated by a post in the firm’s forum. First, some clients are reporting domains missing from their accounts. Second, clients who were tasting domains went over the grace period and are now stuck with the domains.