No longer eligible for free DNS?

Corey Chapman

New Member
I have been notified that the domain yabbforum.com is no longer eligible for the free DNS. We have used this service free for years, and the traffic to that domain has gone down most recently, not up. There is either an issue in ZoneEdit's tracking statistics, or perhaps the domain suffered a recent DoS attack. We do not expect a disruption of service or any charges by ZoneEdit.

Below is the notice we received, and I am certain the domain has not hit 1 million queries in a month. We're lucky if we get in the thousands.

As per our policies, free DNS is capped at 1 million queries per month.
The domain YABBFORUM.COM no longer qualifies for free service, because it exceeds this limit.
Usage for YABBFORUM.COM: 1208402
This domain has been upgraded to regular service and will be billed at the rate of 1 credit per month, per million queries.
 

sandy

Administrator
Staff member
Hi Corey.

You can check the Usage link on the Domain Settings tab for daily, monthly and historical usage.
If you change the TTL in the SOA record to be higher then the current 3 hours that would be very helpful
in limiting DNS queries..... if you make many unscheduled zone file changes then a lower TTL is recommended.

The domain has consistently been above the 1 million per month threshold.

thanks
sandy
 

Corey Chapman

New Member
Under the domain in the left navigation panel, I only see Domain Overview, DNS Settings, Monitoring & Failover, and Domain Info. Within those, I don't see Domain Settings or Usage. After searching for a long time, I finally found it under the main Manage -> Domains all domain overview page. There is a "Usage" link on the right buried in a list of other things. On the page is a bar graph with a "previous Month" link. There are no links for changing the time period to a specific time or larger range.

The actual website doesn't get much in the way of visitors. We moved servers a couple years ago, and perhaps we lowered the TTL to get people there quickly. If we did, maybe we forgot to change it back, but I don't recall putting it at 3 hours. And if that were the case and is the primary cause of the excessive usage, the usage would have been high for a much longer period. I just went backwards through the tool through ALL previous months since ZoneEdit changed hands, and it has been at the same usage level the entire time. Why then would I suddenly be told that usage is too much? How could I know that if usage didn't change that it's not valid for free use suddenly? Did your terms change or did you fail to notify me for the whole period (1 year and 5 months that the charts are available)? What is the allowed free usage?

It would be helpful to get advanced warning that the site has higher than historical traffic (which apparently wasn't the case in this situation) or that it exceeds the free usage allotment, rather than a month notice that the site exceeds limits for which I didn't understand why, how it could have, and what changed from previous usage (nothing). The "Usage" history was buried, so it's not something everyone would even know about. It also does not allow me to see trends without manually navigating backwards month by month and writing down the totals to see how it changed. And since the domain has been on the free DNS for years, I would have no way to know what amount of usage takes me out of the free usage. I would expect the chart to have a line on it that shows where free usage stops, as a warning tool.

For now to get it down, I have changed it to 2 days. Can this rectify our situation, as I don't have a reason to pay for DNS service for a low trafficked site?
 
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sandy

Administrator
Staff member
two days should do it nicely. I have changed the service back to free DNS for you now.

thanks
sandy
 

Corey Chapman

New Member
Thank you.

To avoid future issues with others, I recommend you make the Usage charts easier to find, and perhaps add a dropdown so you can navigate to a specific timeframe or decrease/increase the period size (week, month, quarter, year). It would also be helpful to put a line across the charts where the free usage threshold is. And perhaps the text underneath could contain examples of what may cause high DNS traffic.
 

sandy

Administrator
Staff member
at present you can see daily monthly but I will pass on your suggestion for you.
There is no threshold for free to paid... if a domain holder makes changes to decrease DNS queries they would need to let us know
and we would then monitor and change the service level if the threshold was no longer being reached... and make any refunds as required.

thanks
sandy
 
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