(It's long, but we'll be sending this out to legacy users shortly - discussion on same to take place here).
Greetings Zoneedit User;
I had an experience last week which echoed what many of you probably experienced when you received word that Zoneedit had been purchased (yet again). You see I went downtown to St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, where I've been going nearly every week to pickup organic fruits and vegetables for the family shopping. Every week we go to the same stand, we even email our order down ahead of time and they have it ready for us when I get there. At Christmas time we exchange gift baskets. This has been going on for 10 years.
Last Friday when I got there I was saying my customary greeting to Murray, the owner who's been a fixture of St. Lawrence Market for 35 years. Behind the counter are autographed pictures of various celebrities and luminaries who have visited Murray's bodega over the years: ranging from Catherine Zeta Jones to the Dalai Lama.
This time Murray introduced me to somebody new: "Mark, I want you to meet Anthony. He and his brother will be taking over the shop within a week or two." It was taking a few extra seconds for my brain to parse what this meant exactly, but when Murray added "and I'm sure they're going to take very good care of you and the girls" (referring to my wife and daughter). This latter statement cinched it - with a jolt I realized what was happening here. Regime change. End of an era. Murray was out, and this Anthony guy and his brother were in.
Anthony seemed nice. He assured me nothing would change, and that he'll be happy to take my orders and have them ready for me. But as I walked away I recognized an unmistakable sense of loss and doubt. I would miss Murray, and would the service sustain that same level we'd taken for granted over the years?
Then I realized that what I was feeling then was possibly very similar to what you experienced when you found out that Zoneedit had been acquired by easyDNS. I know it's been a long road for you as a Zoneedit user. When it launched, Erik Aronesty and Michael Krebs were "Murray". They were very engaged and personally invested into the success of Zoneedit.
In those early years Erik and I would occasionally speak on the phone, comparing notes on what we were seeing - DDoS attacks, spam gangs and any other manner of what were becoming near constant existential threats to centralized managed DNS platforms.
After Erik and Michael sold, Zoneedit entered a kind of long, wandering phase. I know when Dotster bought Zoneedit they had the best of intentions, (around the same time Dotster also approached easyDNS but we turned them down. They were buying a lot of companies in those days).
Perhaps what ensued could best surmised as that Zoneedit was in a sense "left behind". It was never consolidated into the main platform with all the other acquisitions and additionally it did not have the benefit of having somebody or some team personally invested and at the helm.
Then Dotster itself was acquired and the problem was exacerbated. We had the idea to "carve out" Zoneedit from the even larger acquiring entity because we realized that there was quite literally "nobody at the wheel" at Zoneedit. A couple of truly heroic engineers there were assigned part-time duties to keep it on life support, but under the new regime there were no new signups being allowed, there was no capital spending on infrastructure maintenance, even the twitter account was deleted. I'm personally stunned when I hear Zoneedit customers tell me now that "the system ran flawlessly for over 10 years" because since the serial acquisitions started there were numerous outages. Those who were somehow never affected were truly blessed with a unique combination of fortuitous name server delegations and outright luck.
I know that since this last acquisition there have been some hiccups and glitches. But what has changed that there is now somebody who is personally invested in making Zoneedit work and succeed, and there is a team actively working on it. In this sense, the new boss isn't the same as the old boss (but perhaps we're similar to the original boss).
The point of this email today is to thank you for sticking with Zoneedit after all these years and to let you know that the long dark tea time of the soul is over for Zoneedit. Since taking over we've:
• completely rebuilt the entire Zoneedit infrastructure from scratch, including replacement of all nameservers (which were previously running unpatched bind8 on Red Hat boxes which were years past end-of-life).
• Brought back the 5-free DNS zones for all legacy users
• Deployed a completely new user control panel (some of you hate it, that's ok, because we're listening - tell us how to improve it).
• Fixed the URL forwarding (half the old forwarders were broken)
• improved the functionality of host monitoring and DNS failover.
• Rolled out The Support Zone user community.
• Added Registrar transfers for .com, .net .org, .biz, .info domains - including free Whois privacy
• Added support for .CH domains
• Added RapidSSL certs
And over the next few weeks and months we will continue to add more useful stuff for running your domains:
• Support for .CA domains
• Outbound SMTP / Mailout
• Geotargeted URL Forwarding
This is just the beginning of a steady stream of useful domain tools to make running you more effective at managing your online presence.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you do reply please understand that sometimes the volume of replies precludes me from replying individually, but I do read every single email I get.
I'd love to hear your feedback. Please post it to this thread. So the team and I can address each and every one of them.
Sincerely,
Mark Jeftovic
President/CEO ZoneEdit
The easyZone Corp, 300A-219 Dufferin St, Toronto, ON, M6K 3J1
Greetings Zoneedit User;
I had an experience last week which echoed what many of you probably experienced when you received word that Zoneedit had been purchased (yet again). You see I went downtown to St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, where I've been going nearly every week to pickup organic fruits and vegetables for the family shopping. Every week we go to the same stand, we even email our order down ahead of time and they have it ready for us when I get there. At Christmas time we exchange gift baskets. This has been going on for 10 years.
Last Friday when I got there I was saying my customary greeting to Murray, the owner who's been a fixture of St. Lawrence Market for 35 years. Behind the counter are autographed pictures of various celebrities and luminaries who have visited Murray's bodega over the years: ranging from Catherine Zeta Jones to the Dalai Lama.
This time Murray introduced me to somebody new: "Mark, I want you to meet Anthony. He and his brother will be taking over the shop within a week or two." It was taking a few extra seconds for my brain to parse what this meant exactly, but when Murray added "and I'm sure they're going to take very good care of you and the girls" (referring to my wife and daughter). This latter statement cinched it - with a jolt I realized what was happening here. Regime change. End of an era. Murray was out, and this Anthony guy and his brother were in.
Anthony seemed nice. He assured me nothing would change, and that he'll be happy to take my orders and have them ready for me. But as I walked away I recognized an unmistakable sense of loss and doubt. I would miss Murray, and would the service sustain that same level we'd taken for granted over the years?
Then I realized that what I was feeling then was possibly very similar to what you experienced when you found out that Zoneedit had been acquired by easyDNS. I know it's been a long road for you as a Zoneedit user. When it launched, Erik Aronesty and Michael Krebs were "Murray". They were very engaged and personally invested into the success of Zoneedit.
In those early years Erik and I would occasionally speak on the phone, comparing notes on what we were seeing - DDoS attacks, spam gangs and any other manner of what were becoming near constant existential threats to centralized managed DNS platforms.
After Erik and Michael sold, Zoneedit entered a kind of long, wandering phase. I know when Dotster bought Zoneedit they had the best of intentions, (around the same time Dotster also approached easyDNS but we turned them down. They were buying a lot of companies in those days).
Perhaps what ensued could best surmised as that Zoneedit was in a sense "left behind". It was never consolidated into the main platform with all the other acquisitions and additionally it did not have the benefit of having somebody or some team personally invested and at the helm.
Then Dotster itself was acquired and the problem was exacerbated. We had the idea to "carve out" Zoneedit from the even larger acquiring entity because we realized that there was quite literally "nobody at the wheel" at Zoneedit. A couple of truly heroic engineers there were assigned part-time duties to keep it on life support, but under the new regime there were no new signups being allowed, there was no capital spending on infrastructure maintenance, even the twitter account was deleted. I'm personally stunned when I hear Zoneedit customers tell me now that "the system ran flawlessly for over 10 years" because since the serial acquisitions started there were numerous outages. Those who were somehow never affected were truly blessed with a unique combination of fortuitous name server delegations and outright luck.
I know that since this last acquisition there have been some hiccups and glitches. But what has changed that there is now somebody who is personally invested in making Zoneedit work and succeed, and there is a team actively working on it. In this sense, the new boss isn't the same as the old boss (but perhaps we're similar to the original boss).
The point of this email today is to thank you for sticking with Zoneedit after all these years and to let you know that the long dark tea time of the soul is over for Zoneedit. Since taking over we've:
• completely rebuilt the entire Zoneedit infrastructure from scratch, including replacement of all nameservers (which were previously running unpatched bind8 on Red Hat boxes which were years past end-of-life).
• Brought back the 5-free DNS zones for all legacy users
• Deployed a completely new user control panel (some of you hate it, that's ok, because we're listening - tell us how to improve it).
• Fixed the URL forwarding (half the old forwarders were broken)
• improved the functionality of host monitoring and DNS failover.
• Rolled out The Support Zone user community.
• Added Registrar transfers for .com, .net .org, .biz, .info domains - including free Whois privacy
• Added support for .CH domains
• Added RapidSSL certs
And over the next few weeks and months we will continue to add more useful stuff for running your domains:
• Support for .CA domains
• Outbound SMTP / Mailout
• Geotargeted URL Forwarding
This is just the beginning of a steady stream of useful domain tools to make running you more effective at managing your online presence.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you do reply please understand that sometimes the volume of replies precludes me from replying individually, but I do read every single email I get.
I'd love to hear your feedback. Please post it to this thread. So the team and I can address each and every one of them.
Sincerely,
Mark Jeftovic
President/CEO ZoneEdit
The easyZone Corp, 300A-219 Dufferin St, Toronto, ON, M6K 3J1