The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Making DNSimple (Interview)

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

What's up friends? Yes, this is your favorite podcast, the changelog. I'm Adam Stokowiak, editor in chief here at changelog. And today we are going deep in the world of DNS talking to Anthony Eden, co-founder and CEO of DnSimple. Now we've been using Dn DN Simple for many, many years. I think for as long as I've managed DNS, I've used DN Simple.

So that's a long time. And over the years, they've kept it simple. They've focused on DNS. They did SSL search there for a while, but for the most part, they've really focused, as Anthony was sharing this podcast, on being the managed hosted DNS for developers. That's what their focus has been. And today, Anthony takes us

into his world of what it's taken to build and manage D?n?Simple over the years. And of course, big thank you to our friends over at fly.io. Yes, fly is the home for changelaw.com. We launch all the things we launch on fly.io. And you can too, learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's talk DNS. Okay, let's talk DNS. Okay, let's talk DNS. Okay, let's talk DNS.

Well, friends, I'm here with David Shue, CEO of Retool. David, I want to talk about awareness beyond Silicon Valley. Retool has a great presence and a great awareness inside Silicon Valley. But what about beyond? What's really cool is I think we've done a really good job of building awareness inside of Silicon Valley. And so when you look at customers that use Retool, pretty much every big company in Silicon Valley of over a thousand people today now uses Retool and builds internal apps via Retool. So that's really awesome.

And I'm really proud of the progress you've made there. But I think the larger opportunity for us actually is outside of Silicon Valley. When you think about, for example, the Kroger's of the world, the Coca-Cola's of the world, many of them are customers already today, but I think we haven't done as good of a job building awareness, if you will, around the developers and all these companies. And that, to me, is where the opportunity lies, because so much of these companies run on software. Software is so important.

If you think about Coca-Cola, for example, Coca-Cola's not really gotten any cheaper to manufacture in the last 10 or 20 years. Instead, the reason why Coca-Cola is doing well as a company is because they are getting more productive by better software. And so every company needs to become a software company and Retro lets you do that. So Coke is a big company, but the principle rings true. Become more efficient by using better software. There you go.

Well, if you're beyond Silicon Valley, raise your hand, we wanna hear from you. I wanna tell Dave that we reach people beyond Silicon Valley, that we're raising the awareness of what Retool is and what Retool does, and some big announcements coming soon here on ChangeLog, which is cool. Well, if you haven't yet, go to Retool.com, get a demo, try it out for free, all that good stuff.

Again, Retool calm get a demo try it out for free all that good stuff again Retool calm Today we are joined by Anthony Eden, founder and CEO of DN Simple. Anthony, welcome. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Or is it D-N-S Imple? Or yes, it could be DNS Imple, it's true. Oh, which one is it?

No, it's DN Simple. You definitely said it right, Jared. I drilled it. Well, that would be nice because I've been saying that way in my head for all these years. We've been long time customers of yours. I think Adam, you signed us up

in the four times. I don't know, like ancient history, right? Yeah, I think I've used D&Simple everywhere I could use them. So personally, corporately, jobs I've taken you to. I think Pure Charity is still might be using D&Simple to this day. I don't know.

Well, I appreciate that. That's awesome. Big fan. Big fan. Thank you. How long has it been around, Anthony? And why did you start this thing? We just hit 15 years actually this month. Okay. So first lines of code were written

at the beginning of April in 2010. At the time I was just coming off working at a startup out in Hawaii. I was a CTO at a startup that was also in the domain industry. We actually had the rights to operate and sell the.MP top level domain, which was for the Mariana specific islands. And we had built this service around it called Chimp, which is supposed to be this like aggregate of all your social networks. This is what a time when, you know,

social networks and we're really starting to take off and everybody's like, Oh, there's just too many of them. I wish I could aggregate everything into one. Anyway, we built this whole thing. It never really moved past the the friends and family money around and the founder who had created it really wanted to see it go big or or not. If it wasn't going to go big, he wasn't really interested in it. So and at the time I was using pretty much the most well known provider out there and I was like pretty much the most well-known provider out there and I was like, wow, this sucks. This experience is really terrible.

And I've been in this industry for 17 years. Why don't I cry, try and go build something? There you go. And so that was kind of the Genesis. And I started with my brother. He did most, he's an, like an ops guy on the DevOps side and he did most of the setup of all the servers. And then I wrote all the first code,

basically everything in the very early days. Well, the biggest provider out there, I bet we could guess what that one was. You probably could. It is, yes. It still is to this day. Yeah, they still are the biggest provider of domain registrations in the world, I'm pretty sure.

That's interesting. And then.mp, I mean, Chimp was the first one that I thought of. And it's like, what else? Blimp and then maybe Simp? I don't know, after that you run out. It is like. There was Bump, there was actually a service

where they were doing phone to phone training and contact information way back in the days that it was called Bump. So yeah, there were a lot of those little name hacks. What about Trump? Oh, that'd be expensive or cheap. So yeah, there were a lot of those little name hacks. But Trump. Oh, maybe maybe it's more cheap. Yeah, I would get the deal going on that one. They give me a T.R.U.M.

P domain. Anyways, I always thought running a TLD would be like easy money, wouldn't it? Because you pretty much like you're running a registrar, you're kind of just gatekeeping online real estate, aren't you? Isn't that kind of good business to be in or no? I mean, I think that the registry business

is potentially a very good business to be in. I think you still have, especially once they opened up to new TLDs, you still have to have the right marketing arm to be able to get adoption of that name. So registries are gonna be the ones running the TLD and registrars are gonna be reselling that. So you have to convince registrars to also go out

and actually sell your domain. And you have to have sort of a differentiator unless you have a really good top level domain. It is a very interesting space though. That last round, believe it or not, was in 2012. And we're actually due up for another round. So ICANN, the group that oversees all of the generic top level domains is getting ready to open a new round

of new TLD submissions. And of course the price has gone up. That's the other thing, is very capital intensive in the beginning. Right. And so you have to at least have a plan that recovers that capital. I remember when they first announced they were gonna add all these vanity TLDs,

all these new ones, and you could submit your ideas. And of course I thought of all the other ones everybody else did, like, oh.app's gonna be huge. I should just go start that. And I was like, why not? It's the internet, you don't need permission. I'm gonna go figure out how to be like the dot app TLB. Turns out you do need permission and a lot of money.

Yes, you do. Yes, absolutely. I got stopped real quick. It's fun though. It's interesting business. And in this case, the Mariana's Pacific Islands had given the rights to the founder of that company for quite a while.

And so we had the opportunity to both run the registry. So that was for the country itself. And we had a few TLDs that were theirs and then everything else they were like, just do what you want, make sure that it's within the boundaries of what we think is reasonable. And so the idea was just give away domains to people

for their own personal sites where they're aggregating the stuff together. It was fun, it was interesting, but it did not last. We just kind of missed. We were zigging when we should have been zagging. Let's put it that way. It's a fun way to start. I mean, that's a good initial start.

I mean, yeah. Could you imagine, Terrence, saying you started the, you ran a TLD for a bit and you kind of zigged when you should have zagged? That's kind of fun. I mean, I can imagine saying it, but I can't imagine actually doing it. The big idea, I assume, is right there in the name for Dchain Simple was like, you know, the big player who still isn't named at this point

is not simple. Correct. It's a mess, actually. So not simple. It's not complicated. And all these like add-ons and, you know, just the crapware that we all despise as software developers. But it just like looks-

Deceptive UX is probably the worst culprit for me. Deceptive UX. Oh yeah, for sure. And then the upsells and the auto renews you're not ready for anyways. Was it just like, let's just make the easiest thing possible? I mean, is that pretty much the idea or was it a bigger idea than that to get started?

I think it was that straightforward. I looked at the interface and I said, I want to take everything out that I can from the registrar. Well, even before that, from the DNS interface, right? Because I was actually focused first just on the operational DNS side of it. And I was like, what can I do that's the simplest thing? And so I did that first, got it enough to the point where we could launch.

So I wrote the first bit of code in April, we launched in July. And at that point it was essentially a functional authoritative DNS provider running on really minimal hardware. I mean, we had four name servers that were on VPSs from like companies like a small orange. I don't know if you've heard of them and Linode. We had one on Linode at the time. So we had these VPSs that like companies like a small orange. I don't know if you've heard of them and Linode.

We had one on Linode at the time. So we had these VPSs that were super underpowered. We were not ready to do this. But it worked out from the beginning. And then at that point, folks were like, oh, why don't you do the registration side of it? Because I actually didn't wanna do the registration side at first.

Like everything else is terrible. I said, okay, I'll take a look into it. Found a way to do that. And by October, I had take a look into it. Found a way to do that and by October, I had launched the initial registration support. Okay, so Adam, 15 years, you might have been right there at the beginning. How did you find DnSymbol?

A little friend group named Steve and Alan ran less everything called Less Conference. I think I met you Anthony, face to face. You may not remember this. If we did, I barely remember. It might as well be just made up. We met at Less Conf. I think you were a sponsor of their conference.

That's why I knew you lived in Florida. Did I just dock you a little bit? Geez, I'm sorry. No, that's okay. That's all right. I don't mind. You don't live in Florida. That was an accident.

That's okay. I think it right. I don't mind. You don't live in Florida. That was that was an accident. I think it was France. I think it was back in 2009, 2010. I don't even remember. Like the last less comp, I think, was when I met you. Was that the one where we were? Yes, I was just going to say where we all went into the water. Yeah. On the island. It was amazing. Yes, exactly.

It was. Yeah, no, it was. It was a it was a really awesome less comp. And and and they used to put on really, really good events. So that was a good place to meet. It was a Yeah, no, it was. It was a really awesome less confident. And they used to put on really, really good events. So that was a good place to meet. It was a good place to meet. I feel like I met a lot of people at future web apps, less conf and just like this era of when I met particular people.

I think I met Chris Collier for the first time at less conf. Yeah. A couple other folks, I'm sure at that conference, David Hauser, founder of Grasshopper. Couple others. But anyways, I think, you know, for the same reason you're mentioning Jared, the simplicity, the feature I recall being the killer feature was when you started or had your DNS set up, you could do like. I don't even know what your column Anthony's to fill in the

blanks here. One click services. Yes one click services. You just click it and it'd be like oh turn on all the DNS needed for Google. Yes exactly like who wants to go and manually do all that minutiae. You made it simple it was a simple interface I think this is before let's encrypt we were buying SSL certificates and renewing them through you. That was fairly painless.

I mean, it's painless is dealing with SSL can be, like there's always some hurdle there. And you've been our DNS provider forever, basically, forever. That's really awesome. Yeah, and I think that's the idea of simplicity. It's something that's really we struggle year after year to try not to cross that boundary of where do things get too complex. And it's really hard when you have lots of different folks

from different areas who are asking for things to be implemented in a way that's comfortable for them, because not everybody sees an application in the same way. Yeah. Everybody has their own perspective on what easy is. So back in the early days, yeah, it was like simple was pretty straightforward and it very quickly started to get less simple. And especially since there's a lot of rules that are dictated by outside forces that also doesn't help us such as. So, for example, in the domain namespace,

you know, a lot of us are familiar with the basics about domain names like what we see with the.com, but the second that you start selling country code TLDs, a lot of those countries have certain restrictions. For example, they require additional fields, they're called extended attributes. And so now your interface has to start evolving to support that.

Some of those fields are text fields, some of them are radio buttons, some of them are check boxes. So the complexity starts to grow very quickly and then you have to decide, well, if I have 1% of my customer base that might need this TLD and it adds this complexity, do we do it?

How do we do it? How do we make sure that we don't overdo it and make something that sort of makes everything else buggy and defective? So it's been a struggle, and it's kind of one of those guiding lights that we always do, which is look for those customer pains and then try to automate things.

And automating a lot of it away, I think is what gets a lot of that simplicity. Are there certain TLDs that you're locked out of as a registrar based on some sort of criteria or buy-in? Because one of the pains that I've had with everybody over the years, and you guys are no exception, is like 99% of my domains fit there,

but then like there's one that I want that you don't support or somebody else doesn't support. And we were recently transferring practicalai.fm over to Daniel Whiteneck and Chris Benson, the host of that show. And I was on the call with Daniel and we were, it was just like a, it was a mess. Cause I know we were at D&Simple, we also have a name.com.

We have a hover and then he had a Squarespace and a hover and a this. And we're just like, how come, why can't you just have one that has everything? Is that just not possible, Anthony, or what? It's very, very difficult because the, so as I mentioned, the country codes, a lot of them require presence in that country

to even be able to sell, to be a registrar. And if they don't require presence, they require very specific requirements that aren't like anything else. There are some that don't require presence, they require very specific requirements that aren't like anything else. There are some that don't even operate on standard protocols. There are some that don't even allow you to buy using the internet. We found some, I think, we friends and I were joking about dot ck, I think it was, which requires that you physically go to the offices in the Cook Islands in order to get one of

those domains registered. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of craziness out there, not to mention highly regulated TLDs, things like.Bank,.gov,.edu. These all require very specific sets. They have very specific set of requirements that you have to follow. And it makes it challenging for sure. I think in many cases, though, we could support something, but nobody's ever asked. So that's what we're things we've been looking into recently. I'm kind of jumping forward to the present time a little, but we are taking an initiative

to look at all the TLDs we don't support now that we could support and figure out what the investment is for each one of them and then add those ones that are pretty straightforward so that that way we're trying to move towards that goal of being able to support as many as possible without increasing the complexity too much. Like driving to the Cook Islands. Oh, you can't even drive there, flying. Can you imagine the registration fees?

We'll do it for you. You just need to book my travel to the Cook Islands or pay for it and I'm gonna need a hotel while I'm out there and I need to stay a week at least. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm saying. I don't I'm out there and I need to stay a week at least. That's kind of what I'm saying. I don't even know where the Cook Islands are. Are they nice?

I mean, would you want a vacation there? I don't know. I don't know. We'll find out. There's one particular TLD, Tonga, which is.to. And of course my last name is Santo. So I wanted san.to and I wanted it for many years. And the only place you can buy it

is a specific Tonga run website that requires you to email a person. And then they'll email you back and be like, sorry, it's taken. And so it's been taken for years, no one's using it. And I had a recurring reminder once a year to email the Tonga people and see if I can have that domain. Eventually I just gave up on it.

But yeah, there's some weird ones out there. Funny enough, I actually helped, have you heard of the service Tito? T-I.TO? Yes. So I helped Paul with the acquisition of T-I.TO. Okay, so let's talk after the show. You can get me Santo.

I can't remember how I did it. I've wanted it for years. Like literally 10 years. I think that may have been 10 years ago that I helped him with that. I'm not sure. I wish that we had met back then ago that I helped him with that, I'm not sure. I wish that we had met back then. Maybe I'd have san.to right now.

Maybe. Well, speaking of registering domains, is that a top level service to use upon a little bit? Is that a first class citizen to your business registering domains and managing domains? So the management part, yes. The registration, it's so strange, as we've been navigating how D&Simple

has run over the years, I never wanted it to be a registrar like you think of registrars. I always wanted to be a DNS company first, and the registrar was gonna be an afterthought because I said there's just no margins in the registrar was going to be an afterthought, because I said, there's just no margins in the registrar business. It's so cutthroat.

And over the years, my customers have continued to push and say, no, no, what we want is for you to be a registrar. So over the last couple of years, we've been kind of investing more of the team's time and making sure that the registrar component becomes a first- class citizen. And now I look at as we split our business almost evenly between the registrar, the DNS, so the operational DNS,

and then we have little slivers of a couple other pieces of business like the certificate side of business and email forwarding and things like that. But for the most part now, yes, I feel that domain registration part is mostly equal with one notable glaring exception Which is our workflow doesn't look like any other registrar's workflow when you buy a domain because you have to have an account first and you have to already put your credit card in and Most registrars are like here's a text field start typing and will suggest things if what you want isn't available

And then we'll take you through that that registration flow. And we flip that and said, first, you have to have an account. You have to put your card on file and then you can register as many domains as you want. That's why I asked that question, because for as long as we've been a customer, we've never registered a domain through D&Simple. And I think it's for those reasons is because I think for a while, they're super fast domain search. I think I don't even remember what it was

called, it was something super fast. Instant name, instant name search. Thank you, there you go. So I mean you can throw it, you can have an idea and then get all the different TLDs that might match to that and then you can obviously register it and I think that was good for the novelty of being able to quickly search through a domain name

when you have an idea. And then, and this is unsolicited, this is not even sponsored, but my default now is to go to hover.com and search across there. I mean, I land on a page, it gives me a text field, it's mobile friendly, it's desktop friendly, and they've gotten our money, literally,

for as long as we've known you, for 15 years, and you haven't. And so I asked that question to say, why have they gotten all of our money insofar as as much money we've spent on managing, registering, and renewing domains, and you haven't? Why is that? Yeah, it was very much intentional from the beginning.

I can't say that it'll always be the case, but it was intentional to, to be very clear to our audience that we were going to be an operational DNS company for engineers, right? It will be happy to support the domain registration side, you can transfer domains into this DnSimple. But our goal really, in the beginning, was to focus on the DNS side of things. Over the years, I think we've had more folks, though, the ones who actually do register domains, are doing it through the API.

So they're building domain registration to whatever service they're offering. And they're essentially just, they don't, their customers never see us. And so that's where we've seen the majority of the growth. And again, because we're engineer- friendly, it makes a lot of sense. They don't want to send their engineers to a place where they have to type something in. They want to provide that interface. And so they do.

At some point in the future, we may have some flows and some workflows that allow people to go in and do a search. We actually did, for quite a while, have a search mechanism that was powered by a company called Domainer. Yeah, I remember Domainer. Yeah, we never really invested the time necessary

to make that interface really, really good. And so I was never super happy with it. So at one point we said, well, we'll just take it out because we don't think that people are using it. Our data doesn't show that people are using it. They're coming to us to register domain they already know they want. And they already know is available.

And so our availability check is just like the last step until they go into the registration flow. Sometimes you have to make intentional decisions when you're running a business to get the right audience. Right. We, we didn't want to just be another registrar. Yeah. Well, I think the reason why I'm pulling on that thread is like, it's, you talked about,

obviously, you're still here. It's 15 years later. You haven't died as a business. You're thriving, it seems. And then you could speak to those details. But I would imagine that being able to, thanks, Jerry, for the little laughter there, I think being able to register domains is like honey, right? Is it going to attract or it's going to attract potentially some bears, but ultimately, you know, maybe some bees, who knows? No, it's it's fair. Look, it's a fair point. It's I've had a lot of people over the years tell me like, why don't you put there?

Even inside the team, we've talked to why don't we put the registration part up front and flip the equation back so that we look like a registrar? And the counter argument has always been, well, then we become just like everybody else. What sets us different from them and but maybe it's the inevitable evolution of where we will go. Often I, I've let this business be driven in the direction that our customers want to go more than what I necessarily want personally. And that's okay. Like that's, that's one of the reasons why we're still in business.

And we've always been profitable. We've always been a stable, steady growth business because the customers are the key. They're the ones who say it's at the direction we're gonna go and we've tried to listen to them and make that work. For sure. Yeah.

So how do you find the right customers? A lot of it's about messaging. A lot of like we, our messaging has changed over the years through many different iterations to kind of massage it towards a direction that will speak to a certain customer base. So in the very early days, it was very minimalistic. It was very much engineer focused.

It looked good enough, but it was clear that like, oh, this is a tool that an engineer put together. And we focused on highlighting things like the API. And originally, we had like a command line interface, which, when you think about it, it's just hilarious that, okay, why would you have a command line interface to register domains, but people really like the engineers really like the idea. And then as we grew, there were other things that we were interested in, like other audiences beyond engineers that we were trying to get, we didn't want to lose that base, because they are our core base. But we wanted to expand, for example, into engineers that are focusing on marketing,

they're registering domains to put up marketing sites. And so they need things to be quick in a certain way, they need URL forwarding with HTTPS termination because Google now requires all URLs to have an HTTPS endpoint really if they're going to be treated well. We would build features and then we would work on how we describe our service from the front page, from the conferences we go to, from the people we talk to, to try to reach that correct audience. So I think a lot of it is just making a decision, making a conscious choice,

and then sticking with the language and the positioning to get there. I just wonder, 15 years of doing DNS management, you know, you could ask, and I don't want to be reductive, and you can ask us the same question, because we've been doing this show for a very long time, but it's like, how can you get up and do that every day 15 years later?

Like, have you ever thought about? Oh, I thought about that. Someone else? I thought about that question. Let's get out the coffee and the crump, whatever. You know, let's think about some things here. Yeah, so over the years, I've had moments where I've really loved doing this

and other moments where I haven't. Because it's operationally, it's 24 seven, 365 operations. It never shuts down, we can't shut down. And there were ways, I felt a lot better when we first started getting team members in who could share that burden to make sure that was happening. And then I spent a lot of time writing software until I really wasn't needed to write software anymore because we had a team that was good enough to

write better software than what I could do. And so then I started shifting focus. Okay, I'm going to focus on customer service. And then I was going to focus on marketing. And then I was so I've kind of evolved through all the different. I pretty much have been in every position at the end simple, shockingly or not shockingly. Um, at the end of the day though, I, I'm a nerd for DNS. I don't know what it is. I go to, I, I was in an ICANN meeting recently in Seattle and I was loving it. It's so nerdy.

It's like it's it's policy stuff. I mean, it's crazy. Who gets it? We're talking about that. You were not about. I mean, it's anything. Yeah. I mean, particularly juicy.

Well, the new TLD stuff like we they I was talking to folks who were talking about all the new TLD. Yeah. That pizza. What's that? That pizza. No, no, no. Beyond the one that's about to come.

Oh, no. On rounds that's going to come up and they were talking about. Well, pizza. What's that? That pizza. No, no, no. Beyond the one that's about to come. The new one rounds that's going to come up and they were talking about. Well, sure. Like, so, for example, this I'm going to get in the weeds here for a second. OK, one of the things that made the first round of new TLDs interesting was when you had competition for a top level domain between multiple parties who wanted to register it, it went to auction. And when they bid on an auction, some of those auctions got very expensive. For example, I think we were talking earlier about .app..app, I believe ultimately sold for 10 million. Google had to pay 10 million for that

one TLD. The interesting part about it is the 10 million got split up against the other people who were in the auction. So they actually made money just by being in the auction. Who made money? The other ones who were submitting for it. I can't remember which other. For losing? They had money by losing? Yes, they made money by losing.

Can I get into some of these auctions? I'm happy to lose. Well, they had already put their $170,000 in to get away with that phase, right? We don't have money to make money, I guess. Exactly. And so they had recovered some of those funds and moreover they had earned money back from it.

And there were a few companies that made quite a lot of money just doing that. And then they used that to fund the other TLDs that they bought. Wow. This round, that's not gonna happen. ICANN's gonna get all the proceeds. Oh, ICANN's gonna get some of that money.

So if you know ICANN, they actually have a huge budget. I think their budget for this year is around $550 million. 500 million, how many people is this and what do they do? I'm pretty sure they're at least over a thousand people. So they run, not only run the organization around the oversight of names, but it's also numbers. It's in their name, right? The Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Numbers.

They also manage essentially IANA and all of these IP address assignments. And what they do is it's multi-stakeholder. So they really deal a lot with lots of different groups from government agencies from from organizations from corporations from registries registrars, from security groups, like all these different parties, and they have to constantly get them together and both virtually and in person and try to negotiate the operation of the internet. And so yeah, I think that was an example of something that I nerded out on just this these policy things. I don, yeah, I think that was an example of something that I nerded out on just this these policy things. I

don't know. It's just it's a nerd. I can go to any one of these events, whether it's an event like that, where it's policy or go to an event where it's more technical, and I just feel at home there. And so going back to the original questions after 15 years, how can I still do this is because after 15 years, it doesn't stop, it hasn't stopped being interesting as technology and as just a foundational part of the internet. I think that's really cool.

What has changed in that time? Because I know DNS has kind of stuck in a certain degree where it is. There are movements to make some sort of secure DNS and adding things. Obviously, Adam said one earlier, which is lesson crypt came around. Yeah, that was a huge change.

And that was probably huge. Yeah, it was. But if we set that one aside, what else is new or different in the world of DNS and managing DNS over the course of this business? So I think if you ask anybody who operates DNS in the DNS space, it's just the scale which we have to operate now because the internet has just continued to grow and grow and grow.

And you have with the addition of the IoT devices that sort of started storming the internet 10 years ago or 15 years ago, and the growth of that, all of those things perform DNS lookups, they all have IP addresses, they all do these things that that tax our systems. Plus, you have bad actors who have just gotten more and more power who know that these things that that's a core part of the internet, and they try to attack it. So I think the scale has continued to grow over time. On a technology point of view, I don't think there's been any major changes. There's been a lot. If you look at the RFCs for DNS, there's actually a website out there. I can't recall off top my head what its name is, but I'm sure I could find it. And they collect together all of the RFCs, the requests for comments that underpin how DNS works. And that site list, if you go down, it's continuously being updated because every year there's new RFCs for domains.

Sometimes they fix old stuff, sometimes they clarify it. Recently, you've had a new addition, which is the, it's called Service B HTTPS. And so this was an attempt to be able to do some routing things in the browser using DNS like at the apex. So being able to say at the apex, we want to be able to terminate a name with not an A record, but with something that actually points to another name. We solved that problem years ago with alias record. But this is actually a protocol standard way of doing it. So I think things like that. Are what we see in the world of DNS rather than big changes.

Of course, you have people that have tried to do crypto names. That's been a thing that folks have tried. It's still being tried. By the way, I saw a new startup recently that got funded to try to do this again. It's really hard though to change something that's so foundational and that works really, really well. I mean, when you look at it,

DNS works fantastically well for what it needs to do. Until it doesn't right? Until it breaks. Yeah it's a scapegoat for all of our technical problems right? It's always DNS. Yeah it is so we hear. I have a sticker somewhere around here that says that. It's very cute. I don't know where I put it. Yeah there's a fan fiction story floating around out there where the villain of the horror movie you're watching is DNS the whole time. I took a song. I took a song.

I took a song. That'd be a great twist ending, you know? It was DNS. It was DNS. And it was in the house. The whole time. DNS was forwarding inside the house. So a fairly unchanged business for the most part,

this 15 years. Would you say that's fairly true? I think so, yeah. I think that from a business perspective, we have been able to stick to our core goals because the industry as a whole has pretty much stayed very similar. Yes, there's been slow improvements, but hasn't been any big changes.

Well, friends, I'm here with a good old friend of mine, Terrence Lee, cloud native architect at Heroku. So Terrence, the next gen of Heroku called Fur is coming soon. What can you say about the next generation for Heroku? Fur represents the next decade of Heroku. You know, Cedar lasted for 14 years and more, still going. And Heroku has this history of using trees to represent ushering in new

technology stacks and foundations for the platform and so like Cedar before which we've had for over a decade we're thinking about fur in the same way so if you're familiar with fur trees at all Douglas furs they're known for their stability and resilience and that's what you want for the foundation of a platform that you're gonna trust your business on top of we've used stacks to kind of usher in this new technology and what that means for the foundation of a platform that you're going to trust your business on top of. We've used Stacks to kind of usher in this new technology. And what that means for FUR is we're replatforming on top of open standards. A lot has changed over the last decade.

Things like container images and OCI and Kubernetes and CloudNave, all these things have happened in this space. And instead of being on a real island, we're embracing those technologies and standards that we help popularize and pulling them into our technology stack. And so that means you as a customer don't have to kind of pick or choose. So as an example, on Cedar today, we produce a proprietary tarball called slugs. That's how you run your apps. That's how we pack to them.

On fur, we're just going to use OCI images, right? So that means that tools like Docker are part of this ecosystem that you get to use. So with our Cloud Native Build Packs, you can build your app locally with the tool called Pack and then run it inside Docker. And that's the same kind of basic technology stack we're going to be running in firm so you can run them in your platform as well. So we're providing this access to tools and things that people, developers are already using and extensibility on the platform that you haven't had before.

But this, you know, sounds like a lot of change, right? And so what isn't changing? And what isn't changing is the Heroku you know and love. That's about focusing on apps and on infrastructure and focusing on developer productivity. And so you're still going to have that git push Heroku main experience. You're still going to be able to connect your applications and pipelines up to GitHub, have that Heroku flow. We're still about abstracting out the infrastructure from underneath you and allowing you as an app developer

to focus on developer productivity. Well, the next generation of Heroku is coming soon. I hope you're excited because I know a lot of us, me included, have a massive love and place in our heart for Heroku. And this next generation of Heroku sounds very promising. To learn more, go to heroku.com slash changelog podcast and get excited about what's to come for Heroku.

Once again, heroku.com slash changelog podcast. Do you try to grow a business like that? I mean, obviously you do, right? But you don't seem like you're, and maybe I'm wrong, and this is a wrong assumption to it, because you wanna stick to engineers and that flow and you resisted seeming like a registrar, which to me seems like free marketing.

It's like, okay, a lot of traffic coming here to just do domain lookups and they'll probably buy from us and then buy the services. It feels like a great marketing arm you've never leveraged really. So how do you, how do you look at growth when it comes to a company that's sort of just built on DNS and provides a core service and it keeps it simple. Have you grown a ton? How do you grow? What are your thoughts on that? So we've never, aside from the very early days, we'd never grown a ton.

My CFO likes to call us DN reliable because the growth rate is just so kind of steady, right? This is to say that's exactly how the that's fine because that's exactly what I wanted in a business. When I first started in simple, I very, again, I made a conscious choice. I said, I don't want to take other people's money. This is not a business that's going to be a rocket ship that if we throw dollars into it, it's going to return tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn't the goal, right, for each dollar we put in.

It was meant to facilitate the life that I wanted to have. I have four kids. The last one is almost ready to graduate high school. And they were kids throughout the entirety of the Ensimple. And the vast majority of time, I was able to be there with them. And for them, we were able to travel together, we were able to enjoy our lives together. They saw they had all kinds of opportunities to do things because it wasn't a business where I had to go, Oh, I'm going to spend 80, 90 hours because I'm, I'm, I'm trying to help somebody else become rich.

I was already rich in time and that was an, an essential part of the construction of the business. We have grown though, and we continue to grow. So the way we grow, for example, right now is that engineers are still our champions, but we found ways to work ourselves into some enterprise level contracts. And so we do that because there's a lot of enterprises that are still on legacy software or legacy registrars that are really suffering. And so we go into them and we say we can help

you, we can help you on board, we can help move your domains off these other providers. We'll do whatever it takes to get you on board. And once you're with us, you'll have a stable system and you can have a consolidated system. And then we built other software. So one of the things we launched a year and a half, two years ago was we call our domain control plane. And the idea was, is that if you have some domains

that you're managing at say say, Route 53 or in Azure, you can actually connect from D&Simple to those services and see those domains and actually edit them and have bi-directional synchronization between D&Simple, Route 53, Azure, Core DNS on-prem. And that's cool. Like, that's something we think that some of these folks that are running in legacy systems or the reality of running enterprises that you don't have just one place where you put everything. You were talking about that earlier. Like how did we end up with four or five different registrars?

Well, that's just business, baby. You are gonna get spread out because as your company grows, you're gonna have people off here doing something different than people off here and their needs are gonna be different. So, different. So Yeah, so yeah, that's how we've kind of facilitated the growth over the years, but we've never strived for Massive fast rapid growth because it just wasn't in what I wanted to do

It wasn't I had done a little bit of that in the previous startups. I worked for a living social as well for a little while so I saw The good and the bad of trying to do that. Is that still a thing, Living Social? They do still exist. Both them and Groupon do still exist, yes. That's true. Yeah, Groupon was the incumbent

and then Living Social came along and copy and paste. Challenged. Yeah, the great thing about Living Social was, it was actually, there were a lot of really good engineers who went to work there in the heyday and they were writing stuff in closure and in ruby and i swear it's anything they would come like they were doing a lot of really really interesting things so there was this really great tech scene in space inside of living social by itself um hundreds of engineers

doing some really interesting things and they were willing to try pretty much anything and throw it at the wall and see if it stuck. So it was great fun. From business, I'm not sure I thought it was great because you gotta actually make a profit at some point. But hey. Yeah. There is that. Is there any cool tech inside Dan Simple?

I mean, I like our name servers. I'm a big Erlang fan. And our name servers are the core of it's an open source, source, Erlang name server that I wrote based and using of course, other libraries from other folks that are much better Erlang errors than I am. And so to me, that's I really love that we have our own we basically have a umbrella app that sits on top of it, it adds some proprietary functionality, but the majority of its service by the open source stuff.

And I find that to be really interesting. I'm just and that's stood the test of time like that's been in there since the start or when did you? 2000 and I think 1413 14 somewhere around there. So it's been there. Yeah. For for quite a long time. It's not perfect. So there's some there. Yeah, for for quite a long time. It's not perfect. So there's some things we're trying to work on now that the downside having a cool tech like Erlang is very few people know how to use it and write it. And so while I can love it, one of the lessons

learned, of course, is that I may be alone in this boat for a while. So I spent a lot of time writing Erlang code where it's just me and didn't have anybody bounce ideas off. Now I have other folks who can pick up that and run with it a little bit. That's probably how you sleep well at night, right? Because of its ability to stay online and tell us more about the architecture, why Erlang's cool, like go ahead and learn out.

Okay, well so, I mean, fundamentally DNS is cool because we can run it as an anycast service. And this allows us to run a lot of redundant servers that are basically broadcasting the same IP address. And so that's, that's part of what gives DNS its redundancy as a whole. And then inside of Erlang, you have Erlang was essentially built on this idea that processes so it has built in process management, it really does want to take over the entire machine. And those processes will die fast. So the whole goal was let something die fast and then start another process if it needs to be recovered rather than trying to keep something alive and definitely. And so that helps a lot with its ability to recover. It's basically fail fast recovery mode, rather than trying to just keep things going indefinitely. What I really liked about it in the DNS side

is that it has a particular syntax for basically converting binary data into internal data structures. They call it the, I think it's the bit string syntax. And it's just so elegant. Like you can literally write out a packet and have it deconstructed into variables just right there in one line. And I always thought that was such a beautiful, including like the number of bits

that's going to come out in this particular section. I just always thought that's such an elegant and beautiful way to handle packets when you're dealing at the network level. And it makes a lot of sense. I mean, Erlang was was created for telecom was created for telecom switches. So they needed to be able to pack and unpack things pretty quickly. Have you looked into Elixir?

I have now we actually I saw I did a port of our Erlang name server from Erlang to Elixir Just for fun. We had no intention really We weren't sure if we were gonna use it, but I wanted to see if it could be done So I did a port of that and then made that open source as well I've written a few little web doohickeys Nothing that ever saw the light of day in production in Elixir as well We had some other team members who were big fans of it. I actually prefer the Erlang syntax I like the purely functional nature of Erlang

and I liked the prologue like syntax of it a bit more. That's me personally. Sure. But at the same time, Elixir has a lot of strengths. I was actually there at the, when Jose first announced Elixir to the world at the Emerging Languages Conference at Strange Loop.

This was back in, I can't even remember when it was, but I sat there watching him talk about Elixir and I was like, man, this is gonna be really cool. And it turned out to be pretty cool. A lot of people really like it. That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, because I looked into Erling

probably way back when you were starting D&Simple and took a few tutorials and I just couldn't get the syntax to stick into my brain. And I liked, for instance, the pattern matching that you're describing and a lot of the properties of it just seemed really smart. And I couldn't quite get over the hump. And then when Elixir came out, it actually, because I was a Rubyist before that and I knew Jose and everything, it all kind of connected. And so I've been writing Elixir for a long time and enjoying some of the advantages of

the beam with a language that for me is just more syntactically aligns with the way I think. But I think once you get past that, if you've written some Erlang for long enough, like it's like the matrix, you know, you don't even see the ones and zeros anymore. It took me, it took me three tries before I could actually get Erlang. And in between the second and the third try, I learned closure and learning Lisp or a Lisp version was extremely helpful in getting me past that hump of what is, what is a functional, how do I functional language, you know? And that was really hard.

Like that hurt my brain to get there. But when I finally got there, I was like, and that was really hard. Like that hurt my brain to get there. But when I finally got there, I was like, this is actually really cool. Forget objects, objects are dumb. Let's use functions everywhere. I get you, I get you. I've been functional for a long time, but you know, I've been thinking in objects lately.

So I'm just kind of, I go back and forth as the pendulum swings, you know? Me too, I tease, but I'm totally back and forth as the pendulum swings, you know? Me too, I tease, but I'm totally back and forth all the time. Oh my gosh. How do you choose? Obviously you make a choice, but you know, is there an angst when you make the choice?

You're like, man, I kind of miss objects or man, I kind of miss functions. Me personally? Do you want to answer this, Jared? I don't know. I mean, I can tell you how I choose, but you're the guest, Anthony. You tell them first.

I'll go next. Well, usually when I select a language, I select the thing that is the easiest thing for me to use right now, right? So it's purely of satisfaction of completing whatever it is I need to complete. And quite frankly, I almost always reach for Ruby first. And maybe that's because I know Ruby really well. I don't maybe it's just because I find the Ruby syntax easy to drop back into

after having not programmed for a while. But that's what I typically jump to. And I do often really feel the pain when I go in. I'm like, oh, man, like this. I just it's boring to me now because I've written so much of it. I guess the way I got around that, though though was just stopping to write code for a while. And then every time I write code, I'm like, oh, this is so fun

until I get about five minutes in and it's actually becomes hard. I'm like, oh, this is hard. Yeah, I used to sit in code for six to eight hours a day. And now when I stream together a couple of hours, I'm exhausted. You know, like, man, how do these kids do it nowadays? Of course, the correct answer, Adam,

is you don't choose, you just vibe code now. You don't even have to choose. Don't even look at the code. Just let the LLM figure it out for you. I tried that the other day for the first time. I've been, I was pretty bearish on basically using generative AI for writing software. And the other day I was like, okay,

I'm just gonna, on a day off, like on a weekend, I was like, I'm just gonna get the editor up and try to use, just can it even run a route, like a Rails project? I started a new Fresh Rails project. I said, run this, I wanna run this Rails project. Just run the tests. 30 minutes later, I still had not run the test,

but it had installed a ton of software on my computer. Which is nice. I vibed my way into, I don't know, using up a bunch of space on my computer to have software because it just couldn't figure out what was wrong. And it was hilarious, I think, because I have a lot of old software built up on my computer for doing things

with like older versions of Ruby and older versions of Rails. It just drove that thing crazy. So at one point I just like I said to the LM I said you and me buddy it's been fun but we're done for today. Not today. See, Jerry is kind. We're done. Buddy. I'm sure he didn't use those exact words. He did. He poured himself. He was scared of the future, I'll let him get in him. We're vibing now, but we're not vibing in the future. That's right, you better be nice to our robot overlords. That's right. I was trying to get the new,

so I've been testing everything as you do, and the latest Google, what's it called? Gemini? No. Yeah, but it's like the latest one, I don't know. I'm trying to pull up Zed right now. It's called 2.5 something something. Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental.

Nice. Just got crowned the king of coding LLMs, just temporarily until the next release, you know? Yeah, until next week. And so I'm like, all right, Gemini, let's see what you can do. And it's right in this function that I'm just, I'm just like, this function sucks, dude.

Do I have to teach you everything? This function sucks, dude. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I don't have the patience. I'm not here to code review. I'm still, it's a give and a take. Some days I'm very happy, other days I'm like, you're really bad at this. I know, it's not gonna be long before it's much better

than I am, but for now I still hold the high ground. So you choose, how do you choose, Jared? Did you answer that question or did Anthony like it? Well, I mostly was joking about vibe coding. How do you choose? Yeah, you try to pick the right tool for whatever job you're doing, so I agree with Anthony on that.

That being said, sometimes the right tool is the one you know the best Yeah, even if it's not exactly the right tool for the particular use and so I will just pick things that are general purpose You know, I like language that are multi-paradigm I like to be able to do functional and object oriented and then I can kind of flow in and out based on what I'm Up to but I'm not gonna lie. Also, it's just like to flow in and out based on what I'm up to. But I'm not gonna lie, also it's just like personal style trends. You know, you do functional for long enough

and then you get sick of just passing these bags of data around. And you're like, I wish this object was smarter than it is, just a struct effectively. And so you start going a little more object oriented and throughout my career, I've changed the way I think code should look, the way I write it. You know, I haven changed the way I think code should look, the way I write it.

I haven't changed from tabs to spaces, but I'm sure eventually I could and change back if I could see it more often, I probably would. I just don't have any sort of consistency, even as a human being. So it's not logical, Adam, it just feels. I decide based on how I feel. And that's about as true of an answer as I can give you.

That's good. I don't know if it's good or not, but that's how it true of an answer as I can give you. That's good Yeah, I don't know if it's good or not, but that's how it works. Well, you can live in honest well, so I think Anthony to pull back one layer Jared will have to live in a world soon where he he manages a Phoenix application, which is elixir and then a Rails application, which is Ruby and So that's obviously gonna be, you know, different worlds, but similar worlds, where you have objects and you've got functions. And, you know, I suppose you have to be

left brain and right brain to do that, because that's what's required. Context switching between languages is a skill. There's no doubt about it. And it's something you have to practice independent from writing software in general. We run three key languages, like our key core languages at the end of our Ruby, Go and Erlang. And the three of them communicate with each other every day. So Ruby is our the rails front end. Go is kind of the glue that does messaging and shifts data from our core to our edges.

And then Erlang that's running on the edges to do the name service. And so we have to be able to run that entire stack. And if you really wanna know how to get data from the customer's hands all the way out to the names of the edge, you have to know all three of those languages. So it forces the team to one,

operate all three of those languages, which operate very differently, and two, actually be able to get in and understand and then make changes to those languages, which also forces the team to ensure that each one of them along the way has the appropriate guard rails through tests, so on and so forth, to make sure that they don't shoot themselves in the foot. And frankly,

we haven't always been great at putting in the test cases needed to ensure we don't shoot ourselves in the foot. So we pointed gun and pulled trigger and it happens. And then we have to go play cleanup. But it's definitely a skill. Like context switching is absolutely a skill. How does that work out then with you having that many, I guess, those three core language, you said key languages. Yeah, we could say essentially languages that have enough use at the end simple that an engineer needs to know them really if they're going to run the whole

stack. Um, the answer is most of the engineers spend most of their time in Ruby, like the vast majority of changes route, the Ruby code, that's what the customer see changes a lot faster. So it has the highest rate of change. Then the other two languages have a much slower rate of change. And so the reality is they don't get constant practice. And then now what we're trying to do is get it so that they can ensure that locally they can stand up the whole stack so that they can get practice with each

one of those things and make changes. We try to those things. It's if an engineer needs to do it every once in a while, most good engineers will be comfortable switching languages. They'll they'll they'll they'll be able to pick it up. It's it won't be instantaneous. They're not going to write the most idiomatic code, but they will be able to pick it up and do what they need at the most basic level with it. And especially if there's good tests that they can run and ensure that whatever they're doing doesn't break things horribly.

What do you all look like operationally in terms of observability and deployment, ops, et cetera? Is it complicated? Is it simple? Do you sleep at night? Oh, I sleep very well at night. Who gets pinged? Are you on paid your duty? So that's a lot of questions. Let's go. Let's start

So I gave up the right to be on call when I stopped writing production code a couple years back and so that's good From my point of view at least doesn't mean that I don't pay attention any time that there's an incident and we have very Well documented incident handling policies. We have one person from the engineering team and that rotates around the whole engineering team that's always on call. And then that person, if an incident starts occurring, they can fight. They basically we have instructions fire up a, we have an incident channel in Slack, fire up a Google meet, get whoever's online right now, triage the incident.

If you can't triage it, then let it ping up everybody and all engineers who are available or who are woken up can come in and try to fix it. So we recently switched everything over for deployment over to Nomad, which is HashiCorp's technology for deploying containers essentially out in a well orchestrated fashion. We also finally bit the bullet last year and the year before it started containerizing everything. So now we have pretty much everything containerized

as well. We deploy using chat ops. So you can do all that type of stuff directly from within Slack. You can query our, we have tools, for example, to determine if particular domains are being hit harder or what have you get stats on things and you can do that from shops as well. And then for observability, we've run everything through data dog for many, many years. And so we have the ability to use data to look at logs, to look at metrics. We don't do APM level things because it's very expensive. There's a large cost associated with it. And so we do a lot of our analysis off of logs and off of just general metrics that we keep to determine.

Because the failure cases, most of them are fairly well known now. And so we can alert based on commonly known failure cases for our systems. How many of your headaches are due to bad actors? Are you at a scale that you have a lot of issues with that? We don't have a lot of issues, but I think most of our,

many of our headaches do come from bad actors, intentional or unintentional. Yeah. Unfortunately, I think that there's, that there are still folks out there that try to weaponize technology and use it to To whatever ends they want to reach and that's unfortunate because the internet was not originally designed for that It's designed. It was a friendlier place in its share with their colleagues at University exactly

Got any war stories or like anything in particular were like the things were under attack Oh, yeah people abused you wouldn't expect them to unexpected abuse had any war stories or like anything in particular where like the things were under attack or yeah people abused you wouldn't expect them to unexpected abuse. We've had a few. So for example one of the unexpected ones was the recent rise of takeovers. So what happens is is that if you register a domain and you point it at a DNS provider, and then that domain gets deregistered. Let's say you let it expire. All right, and then somebody else picks it up. What they can do is they can go back

to that same DNS provider, create an account, and then they can basically say, oh, well, that domain is still pointing at, they could basically, not even let it expire. Let's say you still control it, but you haven't done anything, but you let that account lapse and it's still pointing at a service. They can go to that service provider and spin up the DNS for it

and basically do a full takeover because now they control the DNS. It's pointed at it and they'll come in and they'll say, OK, now route email here. And now they actually can start seeing what emails being sent to that or what web traffic or whatever traffic they want to see. And so that's one that I didn't see coming, but actually is something that is fairly, like heavily discussed right now in the world of domains and DNS. It's just this whole DNS takeover concept. Yeah, it seems like a valid use, though. Like, is there a way to actually stop it?

Like how do they, are they, how are they gaining the privileges in the first place if they don't? Well, if you're not gonna use a domain, then de-delegate it. Don't leave it pointed at a service that you're not gonna keep live, right? Like if you're delegating it to a DNS provider like us, and you say, I don't want that domain to be used there

anymore, then de-delegate it, just take off the delegation completely. Or you can delegate it often to a sinkhole, basically someplace which just just goes and disappears usually from the registrar. Or just turn it off completely. That's the right thing to do. You shouldn't leave things just it's kind of like, if you leave the world not cleaned up. So think of software programming. If you leave memory, and you're kind of like, if you leave the world not cleaned up, so think of software programming. If you leave memory, and you're writing in a thing where you have to manage memory and you don't clean it up, you're gonna pay the price for that at some point.

Makes sense, I guess. You just assume, you know, maybe I started a business, got a domain for it, and you know, the business eventually failed, and you're like, I'm done with that thing. I'm just gonna let it expire. And you just let it expire. That probably happens a lot, I would think.

Yeah, I think if you let it expire, you don't care about it, that's maybe a little different. This is the case where folks hold onto a domain and they're not letting it expire. That's why I corrected myself earlier, I wanna say. It's not really the expiration part. They're still holding the domain, but they've left it delegated somewhere else.

I see, so they still hold it, okay. What was an example of that? There was one recently that was, it was actually, I wish I could remember what it was. It was a pretty high profile case. I think it was for a registry for a, one of the top level domains had something set up that they were using and then they stopped using it,

but they forgot to remove the delegations and essentially somebody started seeing traffic flowing through that was pretty useful for them to attack in another path. So it's one of those risks where a lot of things have to kind of come together and create that perfect storm situation where it can be dangerous to you, but it happens. That's the point, it happens. So you have to protect against it. So we're making changes, for example, on our side, when we have a domain that used to be with us, maybe,

and somebody says, oh well, I wanna own that domain or whatever, and I'm bringing it back into Dan simple, they have to prove they have to basically make a proof and show that they actually have the rights to do that. This it's a fair, it's a rare case when it happens, but it does happen. So that's an example of, of an attack that I didn't really consider we actually have considered a lot of the more human attacks. So we have really strict protocols about how to deal with folks requesting

changes to a domain that we can't necessarily prove that they own, which is we don't make those changes. Right. And that happens. We get a we get a fairly regular stream of people trying to say, no, no, I need to change this. Oh, another good one is when I've got stories here. Another good one is when you when you have two people at a startup, for example, two founders, both using shared access or both having access to an account and

they have a falling out. All of a sudden one founder locks out the other one and you get it. You as a domain provider get stuck in the middle of this fight and you're just like, wait a minute, you just stop people. I'm not going to lie. I am logged in as Adam at changeout.com right now. We actually just had this conversation, not this particular one, but like, how do we even log into DNSIMP? Because we, I mean, it's been a couple of years for me, Jared logs in more frequently and I'm like, do we have separate users?

Do we have? I hope you do. Accounts? We don't know separate. You should. We do not. We have a shared one password. Boo. There's no excuse for that, come on.

What's our excuse Adam? Honestly, I just never thought about it. We probably pre-exist multiple users. Maybe back when we set it up. That's actually what I would be. If I was thinking, since you were there so early, my guess is is that yeah You set it up that way and you just you left it and it's always worked for you

So why are you gonna change it right? You have two FA turned on all right? That's good. That's good So nice, and we've never had a full line out so not yet That's right Come on Anthony. You make it this long. Come on now. What you trying to say here? He's trying to divide us over here. He's trying to divide us now. I would never, I would never do such a thing. Yeah. I just want you to be aware of the risks.

Okay. The risks. Who wins? If we come to you. Yeah. How does it work? How do you even arbitrage? Arbitrage?

No. Mitigate. How do you mitigate that? So the thing is, is that, you just said you logged in with Adam's email. I wouldn't tell you that. Yeah, but we know. Now it's tough. It's tough. If people get in a fight like that, often we say, look, you need to resolve this yourselves. What we're going to do is we're going to make it so that domain can't move.

So we'll lock it. We'll make it so nobody can make further changes to it. going to make it so that domain can't move. So we'll lock it. We'll make it so nobody can make further changes to it. You're not going to take it anywhere, but you need to resolve this amongst yourselves by whatever means and agree upon it. And then we can go from there. So do you hear from an attorney? Do you hear from like law enforcement sometimes? Yeah. And so obviously if they're of any legal precedent, whether it's an attorney or law enforcement, and they actually make a change, you weigh that against its truthfulness and make the, whether it's an attorney or law enforcement, and they actually make a change, you weigh that against its truthfulness

and make the change if it's... We generally just don't make the change. We say, look, you still have access to this thing. So if they say we have a court order or we have an agreement, you know, here's a letter from an attorney where it's agreed upon and it's both parties agree then we will let it move forward generally because we can't stop

we don't want to stop it indefinitely we understand that people need to get back to whatever is they're doing but we it's not the kind of thing we definitely dislike doing it I'd rather not get in those situations I'd rather that folks resolve their stuff amicably but I know that's not always possible I'm just thinking in that scenario, very particularly, the one thing you would be asked to change would be to either change it back to the original email if it was changed, or, oh, hey, I used XYZ co-founders' email

for a long time and I've never had my own, so therefore when they changed it and I don't have access to that anymore, I don't have access to the service. So can you create me my own user? Yeah, which kind of changes I can think you'd be asked to make versus like move my DNS from here to there kind of thing.

Yeah, it's gonna be a real tough sell to even get us to do that because essentially whatever condition the account was in before the incident happened, that's what we're gonna be looking at as the baseline. Because you operated it that way for a long period of time. So that's gonna be what we're gonna say is like, okay, that was the status quo.

Then things started to change. And we've seen this happen. We've seen, then they'll change emails and then they'll change it to somebody over here and then they'll change it to somebody over here and unwinding that stuff is a nightmare. But it's something that we've had to deal with a few times.

So you keep logs. Oh, you keep logs on. You're not deleting these records. You're just safe deleting. You're not literally removing activity logs for pretty much all those types of actions to ensure that we have a history of it. And we don't, those logs don't go away if the account does or the user does. Is it like a separate audit log or is it just like, how do you describe it?

How would you describe it? Yeah, we have, right now we have an activity log for all accounts basically for each account has its own activity log. Every domain has an activity log. So we keep tracks of the kinds of changes that are happening on those different entities. How frequent is this a concern for someone? Is there someone right now emailing you saying, hey, probably not. No, it's probably more like it's probably once or twice a year, we'll have some sort of contested case like this. So again, it's not a huge, but we don't operate.

It's imagine now if you're operating the scale at a company that's running 150 million domains. Yeah. That's a massive amount of potential. Let's just say vectors of attack, areas where security becomes a real issue, right? And I can't even imagine the kinds of systems they have to have in place to keep from doing the wrong thing.

Well, if your marketing is correct, I believe somewhere it said like 200,000 or something like that or in terms of domains under management. Yeah, I believe it was something like that. I forget. I think today we have we have close to that 200K registered domains and I think we have a total of like 600,000 zones under management. So because again, we have the operational the other side,

we have the registrar side, sometimes those two match up, sometimes they do not some folks only register domains with us, but use somebody else for DNS more often, they just use this for DNS and don't register domains for it with us. So do you also sell certs? Uh, we do. So both let's encrypt, which we don't really sell. We just, we, if you're on the level of account, you can get the type of let's encrypt certificate that you're allowed to and then we also sell commercial certificates from

Sect ago, I think is what they're calling themselves right now And they've really the key difference is the let's encrypt ones are all automated and they have a really short 90-day window and the other ones are like one year, but a lot less automation So I imagine let'srypt was a disruptor for many people selling certs. Did it affect your bottom line? Were you selling way more certs and then it kind of dropped off or not a big deal?

It wasn't a huge deal because we never sold a lot of certs. We didn't really position ourselves as a company selling certificates because it was just the side. It was kind of like how domain registrations were in the beginning. It was, okay, we'll add this functionality to support our operational folks who want to manage their DNS, but also want to have their certificates as part of that.

Let's Encrypt actually was a good thing for us because it really fit into our thoughts about automation and how to automate all this infrastructure. And so for us, we loved it. We're still huge fans. We've been supporters, financial supporters of Let's Encrypt now for I think 10 years since its inception, really, since early days. We are also fans and have helped them get their message out there over the years, had them on the show multiple times and have just been beating the drum for years. You know, finally, somebody came around and solved one of the biggest

gaps in the internet security space. And they made it too easy to say no. And actually folks like you also integrating it into the web tooling and stuff. So it's just a click of a button versus, you know, downloading the CLI bot and running it yourself and like cronning up your renewals. Cause that's really the big pain with what Less Encrypt is the 90 day renewal.

There's gotta be that process. And so we all had to run it on our remote machines. But so the infrastructure is there now and they sure changed the, they changed the world of the internet. Absolutely. And it's cool. It is very cool.

What a success story. I am very happy that they came into existence and they've done such a good job of stewarding this certificate provider, certificate authority. I think it's been really fantastic to see. Well friends, I'm here with a brand new friend of mine, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of depo.dev. Your builds don't have to be slow, you know that right.

Build faster, waste less time, accelerate Docker image builds, get up action builds, and so much more. So Kyle, we're in the hallway at our favorite tech conference and we're talking. How do you describe depo to me? Depo is a build acceleration platform. The reason we went and built it is because we got so fed up and annoyed with slow builds for Docker image builds, GitHub action runners.

And so we're relentlessly focused on accelerating builds. Today we can make a container image build up to 40 times faster. We can make a GitHub action runner up to 10 times faster. We just rolled out Depot cache. We essentially bring all of the cache architecture that backs both GitHub Actions and our Container Image Build product, and we open it up to other build tools like Bazel and Turbo repo, SCcache, Gradle, things like that. So now we're starting to accelerate more generic types of builds and make those three to five times faster as well. And so in simple terms,

the way you can think about Depot is it's a build acceleration platform to save you hundreds of hours of build time per week, no matter whether that's build time that happens locally, that's build time that happens in a CI environment. We fundamentally believe that the future we want to build is a future where builds are effectively near instant, no matter what the build is. We want to get there by effectively rethinking what a build is and turn

this paradigm on its head and say, hey, a build can actually be fast and consistently fast all the time. If we build out the compute and the services around that build to actually make it fast and prioritize performance as a top level entity rather than an afterthought. Yes, okay friends. Save your time, get faster builds with Depot, Docker builds, faster GitHub Action Runners, and distributed remote caching for Bazel, Go, Gradle, Turbo repo, and more. Depot is on a mission to give you back your dev time and help you get faster build times with a one-line code change Learn more at depot.dev get started with a seven-day free trial. No credit card required again

depot.dev So what's burgeoning what's new what's burgeoning? What's new? What's next? Can you share some of these TLDs, these secret new ones? Are they out there? Are they published? No, it's too early in the process.

Like we're, all of us who are interested are waiting for the handbook, which is going to be this document that's gonna explain the process for how to get a new TLD. I don't suspect we'll see anything until 2026 probably. It's too early for that, but certainly there's things coming down the pipeline that ICANN's talking about

or that the DNS luminaries are trying to get done. Yeah. What's out there? So they're in the middle of trying to make improvements around the transfer process to transfer domains from one registrar to another. That's still kind of tedious in many cases, especially when you do it at bulk. So there's a whole set of guidance coming out that's in policy changes that are going to be

worked through in this next year that are really about making that transfer process a little simpler, a little bit easier to start and finish. And ideally to be able to do that same thing, even if you're dealing with large portfolios of domains. That's, I think one of the big things coming up, I can, there's always a lot of talk about security. So what's next on it? So DNS abuse is a big thing right now.

So there's a lot of push to rein in the use of domains for things like phishing and for copyright infringement and for all kinds of other nasty things that happen on the internet. And that has to be a global effort. Because if it's if just one TLD works on it, it gets shifted somewhere else. If only one country works on it, it gets shifted somewhere else. So it has to really be a global effort. So there's a lot of talk about DNS abuse and improving policies. The Whois protocol got basically deprecated. Yeah, it's gone now. What's the new one called? Rdap. Rdap. Yeah. And why? I mean, who is is such a cool word. It was a cool word, but as a protocol, it was pretty basic. It was just like, here's a chunk of text.

Exactly. Right. Yep. And that chunk of text was never standardized. It was like pseudo standardized by the players. You just get good practice at your regular expressions, you know, extract the important parts, please. And so our DAP basically said, no, no, we need more structured data.

We need access control. So for example, certain levels of access need to be given to registrars that don't need to be given to consumers generally. Certain access needs to be given to registries that maybe registrars don't have access to. Certain access needs to be given to law enforcement. So there's all kinds of things that have to happen and I think that was one of the major changes that kind of evolved over the last seven or eight years. Yeah. And RDAB's been out there, I read.

It's just now they're actually deprecating who it is. Like they kind of were available. Correct. They were. Simultaneously for a while and just people didn't know about it and now they're starting to actually put it out there stop using who is start using our DAP. Yep. Yep. That's kind of how things work when you're talking about having to move from some legacy protocol to what we're going to use.

It has to be a really slow conversion. Certainly. We are definitely like that's something we know very well. When we make changes often it will take us a year, two years to fully realize that change. Just because there's so many factors involved and we don't want to break things for our customers. Speaking of IPv6, is that a big thing nowadays? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely grown in usage. I know that the last... So we run IPv6 internally for a lot of the routing from our edge servers. We have our architecture based as edge caches that sit in front of our origin servers for DNS. So we run IPv6 internally for a lot of that. We did find that in some areas,

IPv6 isn't supported well enough to be able to route it correctly every time. So it was just like, latency would become an issue because it was being routed through so many different routers to try to find a path. Interesting.

Or there just wasn't a path. Like there was just no path. Hey, like there's no router between here and there. There's gotta be a path eventually, right? Not necessarily. There were certain cases where there was there's no route. There's got to be a path eventually, right? Not necessarily. If there's no way, there were certain cases where there was no way to route. And I don't know if it was temporary or right.

I mean, but it became an issue. But I think I think we're on the cusp of needing to have it. So I expect at some point we'll see it. Come the de facto standard for new addresses. Well, I was in college in 2004. I recall my teacher saying IPv6 is rolling out, baby. And I was like, what's this? Cause they were teaching us IPv4.

And I was like, and they're like, this knowledge is gonna be useless soon because everything's gonna be going to IPv6. So I was very much expecting it and I'm still using those four, you know, the IPv4 addresses. And I think a lot of the adoption is, okay, obviously NAT trying to change things,

because they didn't see NAT coming where everybody would be behind a shared IP, you know, in a local network. And that really delayed it. I think the other thing that honestly has delayed it so long is like, dude, those addresses are just too long. Like, we don't like them. Right? I mean, is that, is that too basic? I think I can't remember IPv6. I mean, you, you can put it in front of me 17 times. You can't remember that. Yeah. But really should you be remembering IPv4 addresses either?

Come on. Well, how are you going to SSH into your Plex server you know you're hurting me right now well how do you do it man the truth hurts I don't SSH into my place well I do think you know there are sometimes funny weird explanations for why things do and don't take off. I think PHP is a great example of something that took off for a reason that nobody would have planned, which is like dead simple execution.

I mean, really. Deployment, like PHP deployment story was FTP it to a server. That's right, change the.html to.php and now it's dynamic. I mean, that is why PHP is what it is. Language itself, all kinds of problems, et cetera. It's better now, I know.

No shame, PHP people. But I honestly think that a lot of the IPv6 holdout is because it's just ugly and we don't like it. And so I'm gonna have to be dragged to change it. I mean- Is it the colon in there? What is it that gets you like that? It's the colon.

What is it that makes it like, describe ugly Jared visually with your hands and everything. Just look at it. I don't just describe it to you. It's like that judge who says, you know, describe porn on the internet. You know it when you see it. It's like that.

You know what? Everybody knows what ugly is and obviously it's subjective, but I don't hear anybody disagreeing with me when I say it's ugly. They're like, yeah, IPv4 is better. If you just, just like your robot overlords, you need to accept your hexadecimal overlords, okay? Yeah, well, I mean, I'll accept it when they force me to,

you know, just like with the robots. I'm not gonna accept them until they make me. I just see it as an opaque thing and ideally I wanna automate it all the way. So in my ideal world, as devices inside of a managed network come on, they should just automatically get names based on whatever your configuration management has set up.

So if you're using, whether it's a configuration management like Terraform or something Ansible, whatever it is, that should just, that should all happen together. I don't have to think about this stuff. And when we get to that point, then IPv6, IPv4 you don't care as much about anymore.

Yeah, I mean, it should be an implementation detail that lives at layer three or whatever. And I should never have to look at layer three. I completely agree with you. But we still have to, or once in a while, because how else are you gonna SSH to your Plex server? Adam you know the way I do it is you use local DNS, don't you? Can I just introduce you to a wire guard protocol, please and stop doing what you're doing? Okay, let's talk about that then because that's what replaced it for me. So for a while there I would assign

Particular IP addresses to particular machines. Now this is HomeLab stuff, so this is not Enterprise, this is HomeLab. So this is, the rulebook's out. The real house is watching flex. Yeah, the real book's out. I mean, unless you're like HomeLabbing to be Enterprise, and that's a different story, then the rulebook's back in.

But in my case, I would have certain machines I would give a certain IP address to, and I would remember, okay, you know, this subnet is.100 versus whatever, whatever it might be. And so I would remember the IP address pretty easily because it's the IP address for the home. And then it's just, is it the last three, where is it at in this grand scheme of things in this network?

And now because I use tail scale and because tail scale is really installed on everything, it gives it a network friendly name that is accessible via search. And so when you set up tail scale for every new machine, when you do SSH blah, it's going to search on the tail net for a machine named that. So if I SSH into Cineplux, for example, which is my Plex machine, it's named. It now has a name on the tail net net and so SSHing into it is just like really just too easy now Do you know his IP address? IP address? Yeah, I don't know that stuff. I mean if I wanted to You can memorize it if you wanted to. Well, no to go one layer deeper like my Raycast Set up plugs right into tail scale. So if I needed to know which IP address was anything,

I could just use raycast to conjure which machine via tail scale and just copy it to my clipboard and paste it wherever. So I don't ever have to remember anything or even look it up. It just comes to me. It's like Neo in the matrix. I know Kung Fu.

What do you think? I love it. Anthony, is that pass your test? Is that wire guard enough for you? Yeah, I feel that's good enough. Thank you. Good job, Adam. He's not literally typing in.

I come from the days where we used to put all of our local machines in our Etsy hosts, you know, so you just. I know. I'm not going to put EE colon 1F colon 92 colon colon, you know, just not going to just get out of my face with that stuff. Okay, you're supposed to be shaking your fist at the cloud right now while you're doing this Jared, come on.

I'm just trying to explain how simple human reactions are sometimes. And I hope that it someday occurs because I agree with you. We should not have to think about this stuff. And most of us don't have to most of the time. I haven't actually SSH into a Plex server probably ever. I was with you. We should not have to think about this stuff and most of us don't have to most the time I haven't actually SSH into a plug server probably ever. I was representing Adam. Yeah Okay, where do we go from here the future? We're looking at the future. We're looking at the future. So LLMs And Gen AIs on a lot of people's minds

How can you use that in it with DNS is that a possibility? Well, I mean there's the generative part of it is not so interesting. The the part of it of machine learning from the amount of data that we get could be interesting, but we don't have enough capacity in terms of as a company, we're small enough where we haven't said, Oh, well, let's apply machine learning to all the data coming through. But I think it's feasible. And our team is looking into how they can use it

to do their job better without putting things at risk. So that's definitely something that, at least it's on our mind. It's one of our objectives this year is to figure out the place of generative AI at the end simple, if it even has a place other than for internal use. It's the right question. I mean, the answer could be no, but. The answer the right question. I mean, I-

The answer could be no, but- The answer could be no. As they become more capable, it probably fits in somewhere. But I think, for example, an example of something that just, when I finally started using it a little bit more, that I said, okay, this is an interesting use case,

is we implemented the ability to export your domain lists recently as a CSV file. Seems like a silly thing, right? Yeah. Pretty should be pretty straightforward. But what happens if you wanna just search through your domains and you want to filter based on things, you wanna have rule sets

and those rule sets, you want to have the flexibility to be able to not have to actually like set up all the interface for every field that you might want to search on and all that. So traditionally, you might use a search, the off the shelf search tooling. But frankly, generally, I might be a place where that could be used. And more importantly, it might be able to take the context of the rest of the internet and be able to use that at the same time, right? So this is an area where I feel like

it could be interesting, but we're definitely still at the, let's make sure we have a safe use policy. Let's make sure we're not gonna put any customer data at risk before we even start trying to implementation. Because there is so much, there's so many unknowns and it's moving so fast, so, so fast. LamaForge has dropped or is dropping, which has a context window of I believe 10 million tokens.

And so that's making things like what you just described way easier because you don't have to do any sort of fine tuning, you don't have to do rag. You can literally, obviously it's pre-trained on the internet and you can drop so much information into the prompt and just go from there. A good example of what one of our team members did as an experiment was he was looking at a list of domains and he said just some eight and like count the number of top level domains

that are in this. Now what's interesting about top level domains is they're not always one TLD. Sometimes they can be considered, like they're considered top level, for example, co.uk. Uk is the top level domain, but a lot of people consider co.uk. So now you have the context of,

do you want it with that or without that? And he wrote a Ruby script initially to do all this filtering. And then he said, I wonder if I could use a mod like a gen AI to ask it to do the same type of stuff for me. And it understood the context of what the internet thought as top level domains and helped him do that far faster. So that kind of opened my mind to the potential and the possibility for using generative AI, not looking like leaving aside for a second all the challenges with it. The potential is there to do something super interesting

where I would see the use of an LLM might be in configuring or hypothetically configuring something. So maybe reconfiguring my DNS or maybe adding a new service rather than clicking the one click. Maybe it's, you know, a prompt box that says I want to add support for this service. And then the UI comes back with this is the change I can propose to make to your DNS. This is what's going to be added.

This is what's going to be subtracted, et cetera, where it's more of a natural language driven option to a user potentially. I don't know. I mean, you got a lot of nerds and engineers, maybe they want that less, but sometimes, like, especially as you get an enterprise, maybe you need to offer something that's a bit more just flexible, maybe natural language, you know, for configuration. I have no doubt that we'll see tooling around ops that's going to be context aware of the entire corporate network. And then we'll use that context awareness to alter,

like to suggest where configuration should go, where improvement should go. When new systems get added, it can basically just go, this system goes here, no need to write, you know, code to configure this, whatever that looks like, because it'll just do that for an initial be in your editor, like the engineers, that's what they have right now. Think about it, right? Like their editor has this this thing that's helping, helping guide them through this. And if you take away the syntax of the editor,

but still have some visibility into what that model is going to do before you apply it, I think you could take away a lot of the complexity of managing some of those enterprise networks. So I imagine we will see services starting to take advantage of this pretty soon until it will, it's gonna happen. And there's gonna be some very funny and not so funny incidents that are gonna be due to choices made to use this type of tooling as well. Beyond that,

I'm trying to think if there's anything super interesting I see coming out. I mean, the internet's kind of due for a shakeup, right? We have a crypto currency has become normalized now, right? Crypto is normal. It's traded on the stock exchange under certain funds, right? That's right. There's actually ETFs where you can buy Bitcoin and ETH, I believe. So what's the next shape up? Is it a shake up?

Is Gen.ai, is this it? Is this where we're at? Or is it something that we haven't seen coming yet? I don't know. I love being a futurist sometimes, but I'm not very good at it. Well, it's hard because none of us know the future. So.

Well, something obvious here, but none of us know the future, by the way. Yeah. That is pretty funny. I was still thinking about interesting uses of LLMs on your thing, where I could even describe what I'm trying to do and domain names get suggested. Yeah, I actually had a friend who built something like that, who did it. So the funny part about suggesting domain names get suggested. Yeah, I actually had a friend who wrote, who built something like that,

who did it. So the funny part about suggesting domain names isn't coming up with the words to put together, to string together and suggesting. It's actually determining if they're available. Yeah, they're available. Yeah. There's there's really, really strict limitations at most registries about how many times you can send a query. Is this available?

Like in some cases, absurdly small limitations. So, for example, there are registries who let you open two synchronous connections for your entire. And that's it. Like you, you have to somehow fit everything you're doing through two. And it's like how because and they're stateful connections. We're not talking stateless and freaking too stateful. So one of the things that's being developed right now is a new version of the protocol that we that registrars use to connect to registries based on like actual rest and stateless like state transfer through the entire packet so that you don't have to run in these situations

where you have to keep a long-lived connection open because it just doesn't scale up to the level that people need to operate at. When that happens and when that starts getting deployed at some of the registries and registrars, I have a feeling that it'll be a lot easier to add search in because it's not the suggestion part, it's the checking part that's really, really hard.

Another tidbit from working in this industry for far too long. That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought about that. It's just Yeah, old-school tech holding back, you know, yeah. Yeah, you'd think it would have been fixed by now, but no But no, yeah, just one of your incentives aren't there, you know, I know that you're enjoying this chill biz you got going on here And not saying that a domain lookup would make it any less chill, but you know, that's the area where you have not wanted to explore to keep things the way they have been. But I just wonder if there's. I hear you. Adam, I hear you.

I see you, Adam. I've got the message has been received. I think I know what Adam wants me to work on next. I'm just just trying to hypothesize here on a podcast, you know, just saying, you know, best time to fodder it out. Let's do it. Right here. I'll make a deal.

If your podcast listeners flood me with requests to do this, I will know that they will agree with you and we can, I can tell the team, look, we have an incentive. Look at all these change log listeners who really want us to do this. Well, I mean, I think our dollar spent alone should be some indicator, right? and incentive. Look at all these change log listeners who really want us to do this. Well, I mean, I think our dollar spent alone should be some indicator, right? I mean, we've been a diehard customer for years and none of that money's gone to you.

And I would probably venture to say, I haven't done the math, but probably thousands. Thousands spent of which I would maybe see five to 10% of that, because I'm giving the rest of it to the registries. This is the part about that that people are part of the business. It's kind of lopsided. All the innovation is happening at the edges at the registrars and all of the money is

getting sent to the core at the registries. It's kind of an it's it doesn't really create a great environment for innovation. And it's one of the reasons why we continue to see stagnation, I think, in it, is because the money's going to the wrong place. How do you become a registry? There, if you want to become a technical registry operator, there's some pretty stringent requirements that you have to fulfill with ICANN to get permission to do that. And then it's just like any other business, you have to convince TLD holders,

so the registry operators are the ones actually on the rice TLD to come switch to you so you have to prove that you have the stability to do this and you have to be involved in all the things that the at the policy level at the technology level to prove that you have that you can actually stand up to what they have to deal with that But it's kind of a whole different business that you're running. I mean, it's it's not fair. It's not it's like now it's customer support in a lot of cases, a technical level is not that different, though.

It is because the it's it's different because it's even deeper at the core. So in other words, if I'm going to go, who do you think gets attacked most often? It's going to actually be the people operating the registries, because if you take them down, you can take the entire attire to and some people just want to watch the world burn. Right. So they they will specifically they they're under attack constantly every day, all day. I'm sure all the registry operators are that's the area where they have to focus. And that's that's what makes it I just a little about the money is going to the wrong place. The money is going where it goes because there is a lot of responsibility

that they have to continue the operation of the Internet. And it's there like the buck stops with them on that TLD. If if something goes down, it impacts a large swath of the Internet for any TLB, even the smaller TLDs A lot of people would be impacted. Mm-hmm Just imagine for a second running The dot-com top-level domain just imagine what it entails It's it blows my mind every time I even start to think about it because it's so fundamental to how the world works today

Yeah, you take it down. You take it all down. Oh yeah. And imagine, like none of this, none of what we do is possible. Is that everything would stop. Maybe the better question for me to ask rather than trying to force you into becoming a place I go look up domains and then tell you how AI applies to it

and you know, attract you to it. Maybe the better angle is, or a different angle really is, is how do you market seemingly boring domain services that are very stable? As you said, your co-founder said DnStable, not DnSimple, or DNS stable kind of thing. Like how do you market this bespoke kind of unique,

you know, features that you offer to the world Effectively because I would feel like the the one thing would be great marketing But maybe you know, maybe the loss there is is not good enough. You know, how do you market it? So we Again, we focus a lot on positioning and how we we use our words We're still very we to get a lot of benefit from things like SEO. We've followed along as the trends have started to change and make sure that we're good at optimizing for a gen AI tooling. So a lot of people are starting to get their search results,

if you will, from chat GPT or from perplexity or what have you. And those require a different set of basically things you feed into them to ensure that you get placement. And so we've been doing things like that and making sure that our materials are both instructional and accessible and machine accessible as well. And I think that's one of the ways that we've done it from a technical level.

But really it comes down to positioning who we want to go after and then making sure that our website, our messaging, when we're out at events, the way team members talk with other folks, the way the community talks about us, that those things kind of all come together to guide those folks who they're having a specific problem that we solve to come to us when there are some really big alternatives out there. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I know how we do it. I'm not going to say we do it exceptionally well, but we do it well enough to stay in business and continue that slow growth.

But the competition is fierce on both sides, on the operational side and on the domain side, but especially on the domain registration side. Like if you if you're into looking at keyword prices and things like that on on advertising, go look at some of the keywords around domain registration. There's some of the most expensive keywords in the world because competition is just fierce and those companies buying Super Bowl ads, you know, they're competing at that level. We can't compete at that level. So we have to instead compete at a level that's more appropriate for us.

What you do is you find out where they're filming the Super Bowl ad and somehow you put a dude or a person in the behind the scenes with a D& simple shirt on and then you get on. Yeah, you know, that's how you get in there. That would be hilarious. You know, that's how you get in there. That would be hilarious. You know, that's how you get in there. That's one of the reasons why we give out a lot of swag is we're hoping we'll have like an accidental photo bomb

in somebody else's advertisement one of these days. It hasn't happened yet, I don't think, but I'm hoping. One day. Send me some swag, I'll wear it on the show. That's right. Easy button. You ask, I will give. All right.

Two shirts, please. Two shirts, please. Two shirts, please. I just need to know your size. So, someone of you email the sizes afterwards so we know where they're gonna be. Well, too easy. Yeah, I was even trying to Google, like, how in the world, I mean, this is the one

that I would probably Google, how do I find D?n Simple to know I need D.n Simple? Is it DNS hosting? Is it managed DNS? Like what exactly is I? Mean, I've been a user for so long. I don't even what you are basically. Yeah, I don't even what you are Yeah, I think a lot of folks do look for DNS hosting. Yeah, I think that's that's a big one I think a lot of people are looking for a solution with a good API and We do fairly well there for clear reasons because we've as engineers we've focused a lot

on building an API that is reliable easy to understand well documented and I think that brings in a decent amount of traffic as well even if those folks don't use the API a lot of engineers just like to know it's there so that the day they do need to use it, they can. Yeah. But I hear you, Adam. I feel you. I see you. He's gonna go work on this for sure.

I really don't know if I'm on the fence. I don't know if it would improve your business based on what I know about it. I don't know if, it would probably just be more headaches. I would, if it were me, the way I would consider it isn't because it was my dream to host the place someone goes when they have an idea to figure out which domain to buy. That would be cool as a standalone thing, but I think I would do it if I were in your

shoes, if it raised the bar of my awareness. And even if I only broke even on the registration thing, does it help me address a bigger market? Because more people come to me. And there's lots of enterprises out there and you've already crossed that chasm from engineer to enterprise. So you're looking to get other customer types in there. To me, that would be one way you do it,

just become more, it just drives more awareness. I, and I see where you're coming from with that. I think there's the, as you pointed out, there are a lot of things that happen when you open up to a different audience that are unforeseen consequences of any choice like that. So, and we have to weigh those choices against what we want, our goals are as a business.

And that's kind of like, we're constantly doing that. We're constantly saying, if we make this choice, We have to weigh those choices against what we want. Our goals are as a business. That's kind of like, we're constantly doing that. We're constantly saying, if we make this choice, does it have, is it going to be overall positive, negative? Do we have any idea? And we run a lot of experiments and we'll probably keep running a lot of experiments as well, just to see if we can change things in a positive direction. So like I said, I hear you.

You hear me. you hear me. He hears you and he sees you. What is the coolest thing you've learned about, I suppose in the world that because you operate this managed hosted DNS, like what are some of the coolest stories that you would have never had if you didn't run this business? That's an interesting question.

There are stories about characters in this business who have built up these massive domain portfolios and sold them. That's just so weird. Like there's so much weirdness there. Okay. People that have made tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars that I would have met, you'd never know unless you're in this industry. Stories of being blocked out of countries completely at the DNS level.

We actually had that happen to us at one point. Which country was it? Kazakhstan. It was so weird. It was great. I laugh at this, but it's just such a bizarre story. I got an email directly to me one day, which looked like it was just somebody, it was all lowercase. And it was like, you need to take down this site or we will shut you off.

Uh, you, this is not, this is illegal in Kazakhstan. I was like, and it was from an email address. It was like a KZ email address, but it was just, it didn't look like it wasn't a government address or anything. I was like, this is really weird. I was like, well, we have a very clear policy about taking things down here. It is. And he's like, I don't care about your policy. I'm taking you down. And sure enough, a couple of days later, we had folks who are like, it's really weird. We have customers in Kazakhstan who are not seeing our site now. I was like, holy crap, that was real.

That was real. And it was DNS. And all he is. It was DNS. And it took me two years to get us back in Kazakhstan. And I don't even think I tried reaching out. And eventually I reached out and one day we were just back. Because that site that was their problem had left on their own accord, obviously, once getting blocked within like 60 days. But they didn't care at that point.

So weird stuff like that just doesn't happen unless you operate in these types of spaces. So the domain in DNS space is just it's just been weird. It's great fun, but it's such a weird space. Well, I've enjoyed this conversation, Anthony. Is there anything that we haven't plumbed the depths of DNS or DN simple or Anthony Eden that you've been waiting for us to ask? No, I think I've enjoyed it as well. I like, I love nerding out about this stuff.

That's the thing. I don't know. I've learned a lot along the way and I've probably forgotten more than a lot of people ever know about this space. So it's just always fun to talk about it. So thanks for having me on to do it. Appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Been fun being a customer all these years. If you ever need anything, seriously, like one of the things that we always do is we, everybody on the team watches our support inbox. And so if you have a technical problem,

an engineer will get to it. If you have a non-technical problem, it could come to me. It could come to sales. It could come to marketing. Depends. So so don't hesitate to reach out. And this goes for anybody who's a Dan Simple customer or who wants is even considering becoming one. We're here because we service y'all and we like doing it. And we'll keep doing it because we actually care about what our customers want.

Very cool. Well, I'm going to open a support request. I'm going to put my t-shirt size in there and hit send and see what happens. I know who that'll go to. I'll fast track it to the right person. All right. Awesome. Thanks, Anthony. All right.

Thank you both. Appreciate it. Well, 15 years now, where they've gone. 15 years. I don't know. I sit and I wonder sometimes where they've gone. 15 years, I don't know. I sit and I wonder sometimes where they've gone. Little Bob Seeger there for you, yes. 15 years with the EnSimple, loving the EnSimple.

Such a good platform, a true focus on developer experience, a true focus on keeping it simple, which I think is awesome and admirable. Even though during the show I was pushing for a real time search for domain names and all the money that they've lost from us and others I'm sure, because they don't have the service in place. But you know what?

I don't have the inside scoop or the inside lens like Anthony does. So of course I can speculate. Well, if you haven't yet, go to dnsimple.com. That's DNS, imple. Yes, dnsimple.com. Check them out. It's what we use.

And of course our friends over at Retool, our friends at Heroku, and our friends at Depot, making them build faster. Five, 10, 15, 20, at Depot making them builds faster. Five, 10, 15, 20, you know, 20 X faster. Could you imagine that your builds being 20 X faster? Depot dot dev, baby. Check them out. And of course, to fly dot I. Oh, our partner, our friends and the home of change law dot com fly.

Oh, okay Then beats are banging because break master cylinder brings those banging beats the best beats in the biz Let's see if this shows done. We'll see on Friday Thanks for watching!