Tom and I have had a hosting account with Startlogic for a few years now, it was very competitively priced and we wanted a cheap VPS. We haven’t had too many problems up until now, the uptime is good and the problems faced so far have only been with slow response times to online tickets and email.
This post gets into technical details of the DNS system and what went wrong so unless you’re interested in reading technical details, you may want to skip down to the end of this post. [skip]
In terms of DNS, our server runs named (BIND) so it can be a nameserver for any domains we host. This really isn’t a very good option for so many reasons. Two of these reasons are:
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You should use two separate name servers which are geographically dispersed.
Using a single server for a nameserver means there is a single point of failure.
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Downtime on the VPS account will mean that after a while, the DNS records cease to exist on the internet.
One effect this has is that if the VPS account goes down or needs to be rebuilt and it is down for longer than the Expiry time on our domains, mail sent to those domains will be bounced and not be resent automatically.
There are plenty of references for this information on the internet.
StartLogic set us up by putting our primary domain name’s DNS record on their geographically dispersed name servers meaning it would be quite resilient to network failures.
They then told us that if we wanted additional domains pointed, we could just email them. This is what we did for about 2 years.
Tom actually forgot this and has a few of our client’s domains pointing to ns1 and ns2.yigg.net (as Startlogic suggest now).
Anyway, at some stage, they accidently signed us up for an additional account, a standard hosting account, under our primary domain name. This hadn’t caused any problems at the time because they didn’t touch the DNS records.
What happened was that they recently upgraded all standard hosting accounts to a new platform. This meant the erroneous account was moved onto a new server. Last week they completed the migration and changed the DNS record.
Suddenly, I couldn’t get to our control panel*. Yigg.net was resolving to a completely different IP. So I figure there as been a problem and phone through to them.
Now I must mention here that earlier this year we received an email from a representative at IPowerWeb, the parent company (?) for StartLogic saying that he was our point of contact if we needed anything, we could call him.
So, I rang through and discussed somethings and then got put through to a technician. After a while he figured out what had gone wrong after I explained the situation and he found out VPS account and said he’d get those DNS records corrected and pointed back to our VPS account. He said he would also delete the erroneous standard hosting account.
Only the latter got done, probably a mistake, the guy I spoke to seemed really helpful and the extra hosting account got deleted quick smart. The account switched to a holding page instead of the “VDeck Default” page it was showing before. So I waited to see if their servers would update and start announcing the correct IP again.
You need to wait up to 48 hours for a DNS change to reach everyone in the world (worst-case) but there is a trick to finding out if the change has started propagating. On Mac OS (and most *nix machines) you can query a DNS server directly for what it thinks the IP address is for a domain. Because I knew the name of the authoritative server with the record on it, I could ask it directly and see whether it was announcing a the correct IP.
# dig yigg.net @ns1.startlogic.com
; < <>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 < <>> yigg.net @ns1.startlogic.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 53630
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;yigg.net. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
yigg.net. 3600 IN A 66.96.134.55
;; Query time: 291 msec
;; SERVER: 66.96.142.100#53(66.96.142.100)
;; WHEN: Sat Jun 21 23:35:01 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 42
It wasn’t.
I actually forgot about it until lunch time the next day when I Tom got an email from a client saying his email was no longer coming through. Turns out, his name servers were set to ns1. and ns2.yigg.net which now resolved to Startlogic’s standard hosting account, not to BIND running on our VPS account.
So I wrote a support ticket explaining the situation and then phoned America to get them to sort it out as soon as practically possible. The support representative said a technician was looking at it right then. So I hang up and waited… and waited. No change.
The next day I updated the ticket again trying to clarify what needed to be done, point yigg.net back to our VPS’s IP address and away from the IP it was incorrectly set to previously.
Today, later I rang them again to see what was going on. The representative then proceeded to tell me that what I wanted wasn’t possible any more and that I needed to set up name servers myself. I got quite confused as to what she was asking me to do because she said that I wouldn’t need to sign up with a DNS provider, I could do it all through the registrars control panel.
The main problem with that, is that I didn’t know where that was, as we registered the domain with StartLogic, they had taken care of registering it, setting up the contact information and adding their name servers to the records. I realised when she told me the URL to go to that I had been there before, to update my contact details when I was told I had to. She couldn’t tell me the username and password so I had to figure that out myself, which I did without too much trouble.
What I couldn’t figure out was what she was asking me to do. She said I needed to “create a name server” for my domain name. Now, in normal domain name management talk, that means setting up a box running BIND and telling the registrar to hold a glue record pointing to this box. It turns out that she was simply asking me to add glue records at the registry level for our VPS (which is running BIND already).
There is a difference between creating a name server and simply pointing A records at a registry level at it.
If anyone from Startlogic reads this blog post. Please reconsider this policy, the way it worked for the last two years was much more reliable and didn’t require a user to go into that unbranded OpenSRS management console to try and decipher fairly non-standard terms.
In terms of customer service, they get a low score. I got it resolved in the end, if it hadn’t I would have called my contact at IPowerWeb and got put through to someone who may’ve been more helpful, I’m not sure though.
* I could still get to our control panel as I just needed to access the correct at our IP, it doesn’t require a hostname to get into the control panel but I think I was only one who knew that (don’t know if Tom did and I knew James didn’t).
** If anyone has a problem with this post (including StartLogic), I will take it down and replace it with one about not using a single domain name server in a VPS situation, which is still relevant but applies to a few more hosting providers.
Alex Taylor is a web developer living and working in
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