Zerigo Blog, Articles, & News

Zerigo Acquired by 8x8

2011-06-20T13:56:00Z

I’m very pleased to announce that Zerigo has been acquired in full by 8×8, Inc. (Nasdaq: EGHT), headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

What does this mean for you? Each of Zerigo’s core services, Managed DNS, VPS and Cloud Servers, and Watchdog monitoring, will continue to be operated. In fact, these services will play a key role in 8×8′s expansion of their cloud computing offerings.

Why 8×8? While we’ve been very pleased with our ability to rapidly and consistently deliver innovative new features, there’s still much more that can be done—both more that we’d like to do and more that you’ve asked us for. In essence, the vision (both yours and ours) is great.

Joining 8×8 means more resources. More resources to deliver new features you’ve been asking for, more resources to further enhance what we already have, and more resources to expand our network. We are beginning work immediately to integrate our operations with 8×8 to take advantage of these additional resources.

We’re very excited for what the future brings, and most importantly, very excited for the new features and services we’ll be able to offer to you.

If you’re interested in learning more, visit 8×8.com or read the press release.

Thank you for choosing Zerigo and for trusting us with your DNS, server hosting, and/or monitoring. We look forward to continuing to serve you with the added help of our new 8×8 family.

Sincerely,

Tom Morgan
Founder, Zerigo

Our website has gone native ... IPv6 native

2011-05-27T22:08:00Z

Today we’re happy to announce that our websites are now fully IPv6 enabled. This includes both our public site (www.zerigo.com) and our management portal (manage.zerigo.com and others).

Since our DNS service already has full end-to-end IPv6 support, this means you can now manage your Zerigo account using an IPv6-only connection.

In the course of testing, we found that a dual-stack configuration (having both IPv4 and IPv6) was frequently causing problems with our existing session security locking (where sessions are locked to the IP they start from). As this session locking has already been known to cause problems for people who use load balancers for their own outbound connections, we have discontinued the session locking feature.

As a replacement, we have launched a suite of additional security measures for our website:

HSTS – HTTP Strict Transport Security, supported by Chrome 4+ and Firefox 4+.
Secure (HTTPS-only) cookies, supported by all browsers.
X-Frame-Options, supported by recent versions of most browsers.
User login history – View a history of recent logins to our site, including the originating IP.
Account email notifications – Receive emails upon failed and/or successful logins and for changes to email addresses or passwords.

The last two items can be viewed/configured by logging in and going to Profile (in the upper-right).

Revamped Referral Program

2011-05-19T22:41:00Z

Today we’re pleased to announce a totally revamped customer referral program.

Offering referral credits of up to $40 (per referral!), our referral program is a great way to share Zerigo’s services with your friends while earning some service credits for yourself.

Our previous program used a complicated formula to determine what to pay out. We’ve thrown all that out and replaced it with a very simple system:

You’ll receive $20-40 if your referral signs up for a VPS server.

You’ll receive $5-20 if your referral signs up for a paid DNS plan.

You’ll receive $5 if your referral signs up for a paid Watchdog plan.

It’s as simple as that! The person you’re referring just needs either to use your personal referral URL to visit our site or to enter your referral code directly into the signup form.

You can get your unique referral URL and referral code by logging in and going to Account → Referrals.

That page will also show you what the exact referral credits are for each plan along with the general terms of the program.

Credits will automatically show up on your account shortly after the 3 month anniversary of the referral’s sign up date.

If you have any feedback on the new program, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"

2011-04-22T22:56:00Z

Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” images for our VPS and Cloud Servers are now available. As is our custom, both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors are yours to choose from.

New, larger VPS configurations

2011-04-21T22:59:00Z

We’re super excited to announce new, larger VPS configurations. They are available today.

VPS’s are now available with 512 MB, 1 GB, 1.5 GB, 2 GB, 3 GB, 4 GB, and 8 GB of RAM. Included storage now ranges from 24GB to 300GB. You can sign up for any of these using our self-service sign up form.

Additionally, for those needing even more storage, we have a new offering: our new MegaStore series of VPS’s. Storage volumes come in sizes of 420 GB, 840 GB, and 1680 GB, with RAM ranging from 3.5 to 14 GB. These are available now in limited supply—see configurations.

Lastly, we’ve also reduced pricing on our hourly Cloud Servers. Both the hourly rates and the bandwidth rates have been reduced.

All servers include 1 dedicated public IPv4 address. Native IPv6 connectivity is also available at no additional charge.

How long until .ly domains disappear?

2011-03-08T15:44:00Z

Given the ongoing turmoil in Libya, some owners and users of .ly domains may be wondering if their .ly domain is at risk of disappearing from the internet.

The .ly TLD is run by nic.ly. The only official registrar for .ly is Libya Telecom and Technology (LTT). Both nic.ly and LTT are based in Libya.

.ly has five authoritative nameservers, two of which are operated by LTT. One of those LTT operated nameservers appears to be the primary/master. Both are located inside Libya and are inaccessible right now, along with the rest of Libya’s internet services.

However, there are three operational secondary nameservers for .ly. All are run by third parties: RIPE (in Amsterdam), University of Oregon (in Eugene, OR), and Verizon (uu.net, in New York City).

Each of the operating secondaries has a different serial number. Those serial numbers are fairly recent—each within the last 48 hours. That provides some indication that internet connectivity to the master may occasionally be working, but only infrequently.

The .ly master/slave expiry time is 28 days—the point at which slave/secondary nameservers would theoretically quit answering queries if they still haven’t had contact with the master. Given the recent zone updates, that would appear to be 26-27 days from now.

Some DNS nameservers don’t honor the expiry value and will serve queries indefinitely. Even if they do honor the value, it’s possible that administrators of those other three nameservers will intervene (or have already) to ensure that .ly domains continue to resolve.

Any update between the three third-party secondaries and the master will reset the 28 day clock too.

To summarize, .ly is in a degraded state at the moment, with only three of five nameservers reachable. At times .ly domains may resolve slowly due to the two inaccessible nameservers, but domain resolution is still working.

Assuming compliant DNS specification behavior, .ly domains should resolve for at least 26 more days. Depending on specific DNS software, configuration, and/or human intervention, .ly may resolve indefinitely. Of course, due to politics, things could get turned off earlier than that too.

The only thing that’s impossible right now is registering a new .ly domain or changing the nameservers of record for an existing domain. Managing all other DNS records, using the existing DNS provider, should be business as usual.

So will .ly domains disappear? Probably not right away. Could it happen? Yes, it’s a risk. However, the global community does have the tools available to keep them running indefinitely, provided that political realities allow for that.

Launch of GeoDNS - Geolocation Load Balancing

2011-02-09T18:53:00Z

We have an amazing new feature we’re launching for our managed DNS service today: GeoDNS.

What is GeoDNS?

If you have servers in multiple locations, GeoDNS provides a way to direct users to the closest server.

Other names for GeoDNS include geolocation load balancing, geolocation-aware DNS, and GSLB (global server load balancing).

Why does this matter?

Consider this example: you have one server in Europe and another in North America. GeoDNS allows you to transparently direct European visitors to your European server and North American visitors to your North American server. Visitors from other continents can be sent to a specific server too, or can be split between the two.

The closest server is almost always going to be the fastest server due to lower network latency. GeoDNS means your visitors get to your site faster.

Better yet, your visitors only ever see “www.example.com”—no funky redirects or weird looking subdomains.

Continents, countries, regions

Zerigo’s GeoDNS understands not only entire continents, but countries too. So, if you have three servers scattered across Europe, you can choose to send visitors from different countries to specific servers.

Additionally, for North America, we’ve subdivided the continent (for US and Canadian visitors) into four regions, east to west. This makes it super easy to send east coast traffic to a server in the east and west coast traffic to a western server.

Mixing and matching regions, countries, and continents works too; our nameservers will simply look for the region first, then for the country followed by the continent, and finally for a default record.

Does it support more than just A records?

Unlike some solutions, Zerigo’s GeoDNS isn’t limited to only A records. AAAA (IPv6) and CNAME records (perhaps combined with AWS’s ELB or similar) work too.

What about IPv6?

Zerigo GeoDNS is IPv6 capable and IPv6 aware, including handling geolocation of IPv6 addresses at the country and continent levels.

Our GeoDNS feature is also fully compatible with our existing round-robin load balancing. So, if you want to balance North American users between two US-based servers, that’s no problem.

How do I get it?

This terrific feature is available immediately, as part of our new DNS Pro plan, starting at just $20/month. Existing plans can be seamlessly upgraded at DNS → Service Overview. Or, get started with a new account by selecting a GeoDNS/DNS Pro plan.

Native IPv6 and Private Networks for VPS & Cloud Servers

2011-01-27T20:38:00Z

Two beta features for our VPS and Cloud Servers have moved to general availability today: Native IPv6 connectivity and Private networks. We’re super excited about the full release of these features and what it means for our customers.

Native IPv6

With IPv6, your servers have native, multi-homed IPv6 connectivity. No tunnels, no VPNs, nothing strange—just straight up IPv6.

Every customer gets assigned a full /64 block of IPv6 addresses—that’s over 18 quintillion addresses. With IPv6, there’s no need to do virtual hosting, worry about SSL issues, or anything else—simply give everything it’s own IPv6 address. (No extra charges for all those IPs either!)

Your entire block of addresses is fully portable between multiple servers you have with us. Everything also works with the high availability (HA) support we announced earlier this month.

Of the few servers providers that have IPv6 today, even fewer have IPv6 enabled reverse DNS lookups. We have self-service IPv6 reverse DNS available today and it works just like our existing IPv4 reverse DNS.

Do I need IPv6? What’s wrong with IPv4?

IPv4 is fine except that there aren’t enough addresses. IANA will likely assign the final IPv4 blocks to the regional registries next month (February 2011). The five regional registries are each expected to run out of their addresses this year or next year, depending on the registry.

After all the IPv4 addresses are assigned, they’ll likely have to be obtained on a resale market. IPv4 addresses will be hard to get and will be expensive.

Your best plan of action is to get IPv6 up and running alongside IPv4. This will give you the opportunity to learn all about IPv6, test it with everything, and do it before the situation becomes critical.

And with Zerigo, you can begin that process today.

To get started, login and go to Servers → Networks & IPs → +Add a Network and select IPv6.

Private networks

Private networks allow two or more servers to talk with each other—privately. There are no bandwidth charges for private traffic either.

Private networks are perfect for things like connecting application servers to a database server or a load balancer to application servers.

Zerigo’s private networks are truly private too. Each network is its own vlan. No “private” traffic on shared networks here (as many providers offer).

Have a complex network configuration in mind where you need more than one private network? We can do that too; just contact us.

To add a Private network, go to Servers → Networks & IPs → +Add a Network.

We look forward to your feedback and questions.

DNS Snippets

2011-01-24T20:18:00Z

To our DNS service, we’ve just added a feature we’re calling Snippets.

What is a snippet, you ask?

It’s a set of ready-to-add DNS host records, such as the full set of MX records for Google Apps email. Just a couple of clicks, and all the records are added to your domain—no typing, no copy-n-paste, no typos.

DNS snippets can be used with regular domains as well as in templates.

We’ve started off with a handful of snippets. If you’ve got a suggestion for another snippet or two, send it our way.

HA IP Assignments for Servers

2011-01-07T17:03:00Z

IP addresses can now be assigned to multiple servers via our management interface.

This makes it possible to configure high availability (HA) setups where one server has the IP and the second server takes over the IP if the first fails.

This works with both IPv4 and IPv6.

It’s not limited to 2 servers. If you want to configure HA via 3 or 4 servers, that’s fine too.

Our system does not configure HA for you—that’s still up to you since there are so many different ways to do it. This just makes it possible for more than one server to send or receive traffic for an IP.

Load balancing with each server sending back its own outbound traffic directly (vs. having to send it back through the load balancer/proxy) will also work.

The primary IP address assigned when a new server is created cannot be used for HA. For IPv4, you’ll need to request an additional IP from us.

Everything works with IPv4 private networks too, if you want to use HA for private traffic. In this case you’ll select an additional IPv4 address from your existing private network subnet. Likewise for public IPv6 traffic.

Updated DNS plans

2011-01-05T18:57:00Z

It’s going to be a feature-packed year at Zerigo, if our product roadmap offers any guidance. Getting the New Year started, we have updated DNS plans for you starting today. It’s been about a year and a half since our last changes, so it was about time for some updates. Here are some highlights:

We’ve clarified the different plan types into: DNS Free, DNS Essentials, and DNS Plus. Previously the Plus plans were add-ons to certain other plans and implicit to yet others. All in all, it was confusing and today’s changes should eliminate all that confusion.

One popular request was for plans slightly bigger than our previous “small” plans. Our new base plans continue to be the same size as the prior small plans—see Essentials 1 and Plus 1—but we’ve now added a slightly bigger version of each as well: Essentials 2 and Plus 2. This should help a number of our customers eliminate query overage charges.

In the course of preparing these changes we did a lot of analysis of existing usage. As a result, we have also resized our larger plans somewhat to better fit actual usage trends. This, along with the Essentials and Plus 2 plans mentioned above, should make it much easier for many of our customers to avoid purchasing more capacity than is required while also avoiding overage charges.

As promised previously, all current accounts remain grandfathered on their existing plans. If you don’t want to change anything, you don’t have to. Your existing plan pricing and parameters (domains, queries, etc.) will remain unchanged. On the other hand, if one of the new plans is a better fit for you, then simply switch to it.

Lastly, today’s changes also prepare the way for some more great features that we have on the way.

If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

DNS plans changing soon

2010-12-30T22:17:00Z

We will be replacing our DNS plans next week (week of January 3rd). If you’ve had your eye on one of our existing plans, consider this fair warning that the current plans will be going away (so you may want to subscribe soon).

What’s changing? We don’t want to spill the beans just yet, but we have three general goals: 1) better align the plans with what our customers are actually using, 2) make it easier to not overbuy service, and 3) prepare for new features that will be available in 2011.

What about existing customers? All existing subscriptions will be grandfathered and left unchanged. You may choose to switch to one of the new plans, but you’re welcome to keep your existing plan too.

Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14 images available

2010-11-22T19:09:00Z

And the new features keep rolling…

Today we’re announcing the immediate availability of Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and Fedora 14 (Laughlin) images.

As always, they are available in 32-bit and 64-bit variants.

Native IPv6 for VPS & Cloud Servers: Public beta

2010-11-17T17:19:00Z

As we mentioned in our public beta announcement of private networks, we’ve been hard at work on several great, new features.

Today we’re opening the public beta for full, native IPv6 connectivity for VPS and Cloud servers.

We are not using tunnels or other strange things to provide IPv6—it’s native. And it’s redundant to multiple carriers.

We’re assigning a full /64 subnet (18 quadrillion addresses) per customer. This means IPv6 addresses are portable between multiple servers that you may have (or might have in the future).

Why would you need IPv6? In short, IPv4 addresses are near exhaustion. Current estimates vary, but by one metric, the world will be out of large blocks of IPv4 addresses in only 4 months.

A resale marketplace may develop and will buy some time, but IPv4 addresses will begin to get expensive. Eventually, end users will only be able to get IPv6 addresses.

So what does this mean? In short, the best thing you can do is make sure your servers and services run in a dual-stack environment—supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. That’s where we come in.

Zerigo already has full, native IPv6 support for our DNS service too. Our DNS combined with our Servers now enables you to provide true end-to-end IPv6 services.

IPv6 is provisioned for servers independently from IPv4. So there’s little risk in trying out IPv6, even during the beta.

We do want to remind you that firewalls for IPv6 are generally separate from IPv4 (ip6tables vs iptables). So you may want to duplicate firewall entries and other security measures over to the IPv6 side.

Reverse DNS isn’t self-service yet, but individual entries can be configured by our support team in the meantime.

To join the public beta, just login and go to Servers → Beta Programs.

VPS server 4-day free trial offer to end Nov 22

2010-11-15T18:15:00Z

Just a quick note to let everyone know that our 4-day free trial offer for VPS servers will end next Monday, November 22 at 6pm MST (November 23, 01:00 UTC).

If you’ve been considering trying out one of our VPS’s, then between now and November 22nd is a great opportunity to give one of them a spin.

As a reminder, if you cancel before the end of the trial period, you won’t pay anything for the VPS. If you keep it, then at the end of the trial you’ll automatically be billed. Simple as that.

Any trial VPS that is created by the deadline above will get the full trial period.

Get a VPS server now
More info on our VPS servers

Private Networking for Servers: Public beta

2010-11-10T18:27:00Z

Lately we’ve been hard at work on a number of behind-the-scenes upgrades to prepare for several new features.

The first of those is going into public beta today: private networks between servers.

We’re pretty excited about what we have for you too. We didn’t settle for a simple non-routable IP on a shared, public network. Nor did we settle for the same non-routable IP on a shared, secondary network.

Instead, we’re providing truly private networks—built on a separate private vlan for each customer. This means you get true privacy for your inter-server traffic.

Each server may be individually connected (or not connected) to your private network. You’ll need to have at least one server before being able to build a private network.

Traffic between servers on the private network is unmetered and will not count against any server’s bandwidth usage.

Wondering how to get in on this? Just login and go to Servers → Beta Programs to signup.

As always, email support if you have any questions.

PS: There’s more goodness on the way soon; stay tuned!

Fix for inadyn not updating

2010-10-24T02:34:00Z

Lately we’ve received some reports about inadyn not updating dynamic DNS entries reliably.

Log entries look something like this:


Sat Oct 23 17:20:55 2010: W: DYNDNS: Error 'RC_IP_CONNECT_FAILED' (0x13) when talking to IP server
Sat Oct 23 17:20:55 2010: W:'RC_IP_CONNECT_FAILED' (0x13) updating the IPs. (it 0)

The issue is a problem with the IP check server that inadyn uses by default. So, we’ve put together our own compatible server.

To use it, add this to your inadyn command-line or config file:

--ip_server_name checkip.ns.zerigo.com /

A complete example is at the bottom of our dynamic DNS info page

Dynamic DNS updates gain full IPv6 support

2010-10-06T16:51:00Z

Just a quick note to say that our dynamic DNS update server now has full IPv6 support.

It was already possible to send an IPv6 address for the ip parameter. That continues to work. However, auto-detection of the IP only worked for IPv4 (and you had to talk to update.zerigo.com over IPv4).

As of today, update.zerigo.com is reachable over IPv6. Additionally, auto-detection of an IPv6 address now works too.

Both wget and curl support the common -4 and -6 parameters to force connectivity over IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. If your dynamic DNS update tool supports both IPv4 and IPv6, check the documentation for similar parameters.

Additional information: Dynamic DNS documentation

Zerigo DNS goes native with IPv6

2010-09-22T15:23:00Z

We’re rather excited to let you know that we now have IPv6 connectivity for our DNS nameservers.

Four of our five nameservers now have native IPv6 transit—no tunnels or other oddities. Just like with our IPv4 connectivity, we’ve spent solid effort to bring you high quality, native IPv6 connectivity.

If you’re using our named nameservers (a.ns.zerigo.net, and so on—that is, you’re not using vanity nameservers), then your DNS service is now automatically IPv6 enabled.

If you are using vanity nameservers, then you may want to add our nameservers’ IPv6 addresses as AAAA records to the vanity domain’s configuration and as additional addresses for your glue records. Be forewarned, while many TLD registries can handle IPv6 glue records, a number of domain registrars haven’t updated their systems for IPv6 glue records yet.

If your registrar isn’t ready for IPv6 yet, you have three options: use our named nameservers instead of vanity names, change registrars, or wait for your registrar to update their systems. This only affects making DNS queries over IPv6—your sites and services can still move to IPv6 at any time (and just use IPv4 for the DNS lookup).

We’ve had support for IPv6 addresses (AAAA records) and even IPv6 reverse DNS for quite a while now. Today’s announcement adds to that by making it possible to do full end-to-end IPv6 from DNS to your services, without using IPv4 at all.

In the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out IPv6 support to other areas of our services—we hope you’ll join us for the ride!

DNS adds IDN TLD support

2010-08-23T22:28:00Z

We’ve enabled full IDN TLD support within Zerigo DNS. If you’re not well-versed in DNS-related acronym soup, you’re in good company. So, let’s explain.

The DNS system was built around a basic set of characters, primarily alphanumeric, with a couple symbols thrown in. For English speakers, this is perfectly adequate. For speakers of other latin-based languages, it may not be quite ideal, but it’s not too bad since the alphabets are similar.

However, speakers of other alphabets and languages have found things to not fit so well. With that in mind, the powers that be began to work on on a solution quite some time ago.

Several years ago, they brought us the Internationalized Domain Names, or IDN. This is a way of encoding any Unicode character into something that fits the existing DNS system using a process called punycode. You can recognize an IDN domain name because it starts with “xn--”, for example: xn--hxajbheg2az3al.com.

Zerigo has supported these all along. However, notice the .com on the end. That’s the TLD (top level domain) and it’s still in a latin character set. The next step in the IDN process is to make it possible for those to be in native languages too.

That brings us to today. Starting in May, ICANN formally launched a handful of IDN TLDs. They’ve added a couple more since May too. Appropriate registries in the countries that have been assigned IDN TLDs are just now in the process of making IDN TLD domain registrations available.

The new TLDs also use punycode. For example, Russia’s new IDN TLD is .xn--p1ai (which is the two cyrillic letters for RF, Russian Federation).

We’re pleased to support all of the TLDs that ICANN has approved as of today. For the IDN TLDs that are issuing domains now, you can use those domains with Zerigo today. For the IDN TLDs that have been approved but domain registrations are still pending, we have everything ready.

Currently supported IDN TLDs are for China, Egypt, Hong Kong, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and United Arab Emirates (list).

Using our example above, a full IDN domain in our system might look like:
xn--e1afmkfd.xn--p1ai.

ICANN will be assigning more of these TLDs in the coming months and we’ll be adding them to our system too.

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.