Public DNS motivation & genesis (was: 'another free dns')

[sts+dejanews at senator.colospgs.co.us]

In article <14323.51512.879665.742838 at dolphin.mojam.com>,

Barry> What I don't understand is how do the organizations that run free
Barry> services like this justify it.  Do they get customers for their
Barry> other services based on their name recognition?

skip> That puzzles me as well.  You'd think they would at least
skip> sell ad space on their server.

The reason we originally did the Public DNS is documented in
our FAQ. My partners and I were doing distributed development
of some software. This entailed requiring our servers to be on
the network most or all of the time. Because the applications
we were writing were network-oriented (especially the main one,
a dynamically reconfigurable secure VPN) we also were experimenting
with other fundamental network protocols. At about this time we
received some outrageously expensive quotations for ongoing services
provided by ISPs that were basically functions that their software
was doing, and that had no labor cost beyond a short setup. Effectively,
we decided to be our own ISP.

At about this time we were attempting to sell various software
packages, Internet business plans, and computing services. None
of these ventures went very far. As a group of engineers we decided
to learn more about marketing. It wasn't clear how to market ourselves
and our knowledge on the Internet, but it was clear that one had
to offer something to get folks to ones web pages. Since we needed
to administer DNS anyway (between our various machines) we needed
some of the tools which later grew into the Public DNS.

The service just kept growing, and due to other opportunities
arising it became one that to which we could devote a fair amount
of time.

Now it is something that I and my partners feel is providing some
benefit to the net, is somewhat cool, and could be a source of
some benefits (monetary or otherwise.) However, in my personal case,
I spend most of my time at my full-time job.

Really, we're open to suggestions now that its grown quite a bit.
I don't want it to die, but don't see how it can continue to grow
at its current rate and not get unmanage-able. Some of you might
argue that it already is, and I'm not sure that I'd disagree.

There are benefits to running it:
 - We do meet interesting folks, but they rarely (only twice
   in fact) have ever generated any income.
 - We get donations of equipment to upgrade these machines periodically.
   This makes the Internet feel somewhat like how it did when we
   first started learning about it.





Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.