(1) losing some of your hard-earned traffic
(2) getting DDoSed
(3) having your customers syphoned off to a scammer’s copycat site to give up their secure information, thinking they are on your (previously) trusted site?
Here’s the story: One of my colleagues had the misfortune to speak with a paid employee who flatly announced in the North American vernacular, “Paying for DNS is “retarded.” Really?
Never mind the insensitivity of such a term, calling the buyer “retarded” insults the IT Professional or businessperson who has chosen to insure his investment. This misguided “genius” insinuates that the buyer who actually invests in something whose basic function can be had gratis is worse than a fool.
Some kind of DNS name-server set-up is necessary for any hosting solution. It started out 3 decades ago, and is still largely offered as, a “free” component of one’s hosting infrastructure. So what? Implying that paying for it is somehow foolish, or beyond that — “a very bad buying decision that only a mentally-challenged individual could be conned into” — must only come from someone either ignorant ( especially after July 8th, 2008, when Kaminsky’s recursive exploit was announced and patches released ) or someone with no investment in having a domain available 100% of the time.
Take a hint from the the “big dogs” at the enterprise level. They spend plenty of money on making sure their sites are up, running and optimized. One way or another, they pay for DNS, and pay a lot. They pay for zone files and/or code to be written, for failover and load-balancing boxes, and for people to manage them. But they also have a lot, if not everything, riding on those sites’ being available every single time someone clicks on their link, banner, or ad, or types-in their domain name.
For small business owners, to mid-sized company IT professionals, outsourcing makes a lot of sense if you can fix the both problems of vulnerability and sluggish performance in one action…
Yes, there are horror stories about Overages and so on, but frankly much less so than in your own cell phone bill. The legacy phone comanies and wireless plans are notorious for generating crazy bills in a usage-based model. Typically, though, at a high-end service you will have a rep assigned to your account whose business it is to make sure you’re in the optimum tier of service. They get neither kudos nor commissions when you get hit with overages… but they are compensated when they stay on top of your account, keep in touch and upgrade you properly as your traffic grows, keeping your traffic costs down and keeping your doorway open to customers coming to buy from you.
