I am getting pretty concerned here.

The service:

http://www.mydomain.com

Which does domain registration, email forwarding, and hosting, has not been working for the past 12 hours or so.

http://www.mydomain.com is down

and all of the domains that I know of with their service are not working and the email addresses are not forwording.

Does anyone have any information of what's going on here?

Is it possible they went out of business and wouldn't warn anyone?

Or is there servers maybe having problems.

If anyone has any information on what's going on with these guys, please let me know. I've have two domains with them and paid for 2 years in full.

Thanks

Hmm.. that's quite a coincidence.. are they in any way related to vdirect.com? They offer similar services and are down for about 2 days now too!! I have also paid them to get forwarding without ads, and I too wonder if they just went out of business without notice or if something else is going on...

but I'm getting concerned.

If anyone has any information, please post.

Thanks

mydomain.com seems to be back up, however none of the domains I have redirecting throuhg mydomain work right now :(

As of 13:41 PST - Feb 10, http://www.mydomain.com is still not working for me.

And none of my domains are forwarding.

Gee it looks like both companies *are* the same! VDirect.com is online again too, and none of my redirects are working, they all just open the vdirect.com main page!! Grmbl...

usual when a service is free, no long use it and never register a name at namesdirect.com

VDirect.com is working for me, but mydomain.com is not. We're using Mydomain.com's DNS service for a couple of domains and none of them are working at the moment. I guess you can't complain though (since they're offering their services for free).

down temporarily, or if there've jumped ship. Is it possible they've gone out of business?

Or do we need more time to find out if this is just a technical problem?

I would expect that they would notify their members.

http://www.NamesDirect.com

(which is used in concert with MyDomain.com) is also down at the moment.

Originally posted by Mr. Amazon
VDirect.com is working for me, but mydomain.com is not. We're using Mydomain.com's DNS service for a couple of domains and none of them are working at the moment. I guess you can't complain though (since they're offering their services for free).

Yeah I wouldn't complain either when the service would be free, but I pay a yearly fee to forward some of my domains, so there is no ads shown.. that *does* give me a reason to complain..

I've experienced down times before with vdirect, but certainly nothing like the past 2-3 days! Good thing I'm leaving them anyway.. using domain pointers from now on.

Here's the information about MyDomain.com at register.com's information about them. Jerks don't leave a phone number:

Domain Name: mydomain.com

Administrative Contact:
Customer, Service support@mydomain.com
P.O. Box 637
Los Gatos, CA 95031
US
000-000-0000

Technical Contact:
Customer, Service support@mydomain.com
P.O. Box 637
Los Gatos, CA 95031
US
000-000-0000

Billing Contact:
Customer, Service support@mydomain.com
P.O. Box 637
Los Gatos, CA 95031
US
000-000-0000

Originally posted by Change


Yeah I wouldn't complain either when the service would be free,

Yes, but I did pay $14.95 per year for each domain, and registered it through, starting at, MyDomain.com. MyDomain.com uses NamesDirect as a partner, and NameDirect charges $35 per year.

So, Since I paid for two domains at $14.95 per year each through MyDomain, I do feel I paid for this.

I use mydomain.com for some of my personal domains and they are all down. I only use them for my own domains that I have pointed to a temp page. They are not reliable enough to use for others' sites.

wahoo mydomain seems to be back up now

Go to the third post by Jeremy Howard:

http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2272

-------------------------------------

Working for me now. A domain name services provider should never go down. Even if their web site goes down, they should still have multiple redundent domain name servers--the DNS system is designed to smoothly route to working servers when some are down.

OK, I've just checked. It's really bad... MyDomain has 2 mail servers listed, so there's redundancy in case one is down. But guess what: both server names resolve to the same IP address! That means they've listed 2 names for the same machine! So there's no real redundancy for anyone using MyDomain for mail forwarding--if their server goes down you're out of luck...

It gets worse. They list 4 servers for DNS, so that sounds like good... BUT, all 4 servers are on the same switch! That means that if there's any problems with that one switch, or with the upstream network provider, you've lost your name services...

You can replicate this analysis for yourself if you like. Here's the result of querying mydomain.com's mail and name servers:

code:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------;; ANSWER SECTION:
mydomain.com. 86400 IN MX 300 m.dnsix.com.
mydomain.com. 86400 IN MX 300 m1.dnsix.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mydomain.com. 300 IN NS ns1.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com. 300 IN NS ns2.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com. 300 IN NS ns3.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com. 300 IN NS ns4.mydomain.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
m.dnsix.com. 300 IN A 216.148.213.135
m1.dnsix.com. 300 IN A 216.148.213.135
ns1.mydomain.com. 300 IN A 216.148.213.141
ns2.mydomain.com. 300 IN A 216.148.221.142
ns3.mydomain.com. 300 IN A 216.148.213.143
ns4.mydomain.com. 300 IN A 216.148.221.144

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 'MX' records at the top are the names of the mail servers. Their IP addresses are shown at the bottom--note that they are identical! The name servers are listed in the "authority section" as NS records, and again their IP addresses are at the bottom. You can use http://visualroute.visualware.com to trace the path to each of these addresses, and in each case you'll see the 2nd to last hop is the same IP address.

The reason this is frightening is that a DNS providers #1 job is to provide good DNS services, and every DNS book ever written explains in detail how geographic and systems redundancy is vital, and is easy to achieve. Take a look for instance at the server locations for ZoneEdit, a competitor of MyDomain: http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/network.html . Different geographic areas, different hardware, different software in each location--so there's no single point of failure.

I NEVER would have thought that all 4 machines would go down but to make sure it doesn't happen again I have 3 and thinong of adding zoneedit too

NS1.MYDOMAIN.COM
NS2.MYDOMAIN.COM
NS1.EVERYDNS.NET
NS2.EVERYDNS.NET
NS1.DIXIESYS.COM
NS2.DIXIESYS.COM

now if all those go down or get DoSed I am going to be very mad

Please check out some of the excellent comments on the forum below:

http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2272

I really think that Richard (from MyDomain.com) needs to respond to some of these matters.

Richard has posted a very long and detailed response to this issue at http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2272 and he asked me to repost his comments below.

Remember, everything below the line comes from HIM not me!

---------------------

It's Monday, and in reading another message board I was asked by Edwin to come over here and respond.

Yes: our dns servers are currently all in one room, the mydomain.com service is free and we do not publish our telephone number.

Yesterday (Sunday, Feb 10th, 2002), we were dDOS'd. All services for mydomain.com and namesdirect.com were affected. We will be sending this out to our members:
"On Sunday, Feb 10th, we experienced a distributed denial of service attack (dDOS) from 5:30am PST Sunday to approximately 2:30pm PST Sunday. What is a dDOS attack? Basically, it's like the old children's practical joke of ringing a neighbor's doorbell over and over and hiding each time when they come to answer the doorbell. As long as the doorbell keeps ringing, the neighbor is distracted from doing anything else.

Well, on Sunday 40 cruise ships of pranksters were ringing our doorbell. While they were doing that, our servers were slowed and email and other services were harmed. Since we run a free, public service at MyDomain, it is baffling that we would be a target. In any case, it was a tedious task to fight this attack, but we were back up 100% at 2:30pm Sunday. And, although it meant another weekend day spent working, my bigger concern was for you our members. On that note, we apologize on behalf of our attackers for the inconvenience they caused.

A simple description of a dDOS is at: http://news.com.com/2100-1017-236728.html?legacy=cnet, and a more technical one is at: http://www.networkmagazine.com/article/NMG20000512S0041
"

The most important topic brought up in this thread is the geographically dispursed dns servers.

One of our competitors: ZoneEdit has 4 dns servers spread around the USA. Does this help? No. Why? Because 97% of our users are using Forwarding Services.

Both mydomain.com and zoneedit.com run our forwarding services in the same fashion. 1000s of domain names point to a single IP address. At that IP address we run a script that looks up your domain in the database and then builds an html redirect page or a html frame page. Thus having 4 dns servers spread around the world doesn't help you if your network gets ddos'd.

IE Let's say we moved 3 of our dns servers outside of our AT&T facility. But since the forwarding servers (multiple load balanced servers) and the database servers are in ATT, if our network at ATT gets ddos'd, then what good does it do to have the dns server in Exodus tell your browser that the IP for your domain is in ATT?

Mydomain, easydns and zoneedit are competitors, but we also chat and are quite friendly. We have all acknowledged that the single point of failure are the forwarding servers.

So why does Zoneedit run geographically dispursed dns servers. 1) it is good form and makes your dns servers RFC compliant so you can service ccTLD domains (like .nl) that require your dns servers to be geographically dispursed.
2) their customer base (unlike ours) is more technical and makes more use of MX Records, IP Pointing/A Records and CNAMEs.
But it still stands that their Forwarding customers are no better off with 4 geographically dispursed dns servers than 4 servers in the same room.

Whew, are you still with me? Ok, but we're not lazy. Since this was our second dDOS attack in 6 months, we've got to figure out a solution right? Well, going after the script kiddies is like chasing cockroaches with a flyswatter. Here's our answer (and we are open to feedback):

- put all domains to a ttl of 300s
- run realtime database replication of the 600,000 domains from the master at ATT to slaves in 2 other datacenters
(the slaves are made with a database server and a forwarding server)
- locate at least 2 of the dns servers into the other 2 datacenters (one in each)
- if we are ddos'd then update the "remote" dns servers with the IP of slave forwarding server in it's datacenter.

This would then take the traffic and spread it across two backup datacenters. This is important since it doesn't do any good to just move all the traffic over to a single backup datacenter (if the hacker just changes the IP of the target to the new IP, then we're just being ddos'd in the new location). It takes a lot of work to ddos two datacenters.

Re: spamvertised sites. The customer service manager deals with spamvertised sites and does so with vigour. Check out our recently hardened Terms & Conditions and you'll see that we have one of the toughest anti-spam stances. We do have an auto-reply on emails sent to abuse@mydomain.com since most emails sent there are for faked headers, or are from our own members when we forward spam addressed (to them) through our servers to the email address they asked us to forward to but then they think we are the source. These are explained in the auto-reply and another email address is given for you to escalate to.

Incidentally we disconnect 1 to 2 spamvertised sites a day after confirming that they are guilty as charged.

I thank Edwin for telling me about this forum. Please email me when you need me to come back in. I'm more than happy to keep everyone updated and informed. I'd give out my cell phone but I did that once and now I'm usually called within 10 minutes of a problem, (which is usually 8 minutes after we've already started working on it).

seemed for a while login was down and email hmm was that corrent that it was down again or was that just me?