Hi
@NameGroove,
@biggie, fellow investors,
I wanted to shed some light on why this issue is more serious than it might seem at first glance.
It's true that many users are able to access Afternic's landing pages when using ns1 and ns2, but this is only a
very basic check. The underlying issue is that these nameservers have a "lame" delegation, meaning they don't correctly respond with Afternic's authoritative nameservers for Afternic customer domains. This can lead to a number of problems, including:
- Failed pre-delegation checks: There are registries who perform "pre-delegation" checks to ensure that new nameservers are configured correctly. When a domain owner tries to change their nameservers to ns1 or ns2, the registry rejects the change due to the incorrect delegation. This is a major inconvenience for Afternic customers, and it's already frequently reported on this forum, also recently in this thread. The workaround with using ns3/ns4 or ns5/ns6 helps.
- DNS resolution issues: "Lame" delegation can cause intermittent connectivity issues. Even if you can access a website, other users might not. "Lame" delegations can cause inconsistent behavior across different networks and devices. This can lead to unpredictable website performance, slow loading times, and even connectivity issues for some users.
- Security concerns: A misconfigured DNS setup can be a potential security risk, as it can make it easier for attackers to manipulate DNS traffic.
DNS is a fundamental part of the internet, and it's important that it works correctly. A "lame" delegation is a technical error that should be fixed. GoDaddy
promotes itself as a reliable and trustworthy DNS provider. By not fixing this issue, they are damaging their reputation and making it difficult for customers to trust their services. Unfortunately I have to conclude that in many more cases GoDaddy/Afternic addresses technical issues insufficiently, very slowly, or not at all. This forum, including this specific thread, are full of experiences in that regard.
What actually surprises me the most is that through the Neustar Registry acquisition, GoDaddy has all the knowledge in-house to properly configure their own nameservers. GoDaddy's Premium / Bullet Proof DNS Hosting services are sold commercially, and GoDaddy claims to be an authority in this regard. Why can't the ns1/ns2 Afternic nameservers be properly configured? Remember that the ns1/ns2 nameservers are used for more than 3 million customer domain names, which creates (should create) a great responsibility.
Afternic customers should be able to choose any of the available 6 nameservers without worrying about whether it will work correctly or not. Especially because in Afternic documentation, the ns1/ns2 nameservers are considered the default nameservers for configuring your Afternic landers. Until the issues have been resolved, I keep recommending Afternic customers to use ns3/ns4 -or- ns5/ns6 for all their domains with Afternic landers.
https://dnsviz.net/
https://blog.apnic.net/2021/03/16/the-prevalence-persistence-perils-of-lame-nameservers/
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~gakiwate/papers/unresolved_issues-imc20.pdf
DAN.COM would have fixed this issue the same day, because they just wanted everything to work correctly.
RIP DAN.COM.
To my friend
@biggie I would like to say that he sets the bar very low. I remember a similar discussion, where it turned out that you still
combine nameservers from various marketplaces at the same time for your domains, which nowadays really gives all kinds of problems with TLS, both in the browser, and on the TLS cert provisioning side. Of course you're free to keep using ns1/ns2 if it just "works for you", though.
As per GoDaddy Premier Hub:
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