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A comment on Ask HN: ICANN charges only 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: ICANN charges only 18¢ per domain name, why am I ... by feld on Friday December 18, 2015 @02:49PM (#10760536)
at vBSDCon 2013 they explained the immense redundancy and diversity of their NS hosting of .com, .net, and .org. At their POPs they have:

  * Diverse switches
  * Diverse load balancers
  * Diverse servers (from different mfgrs AND hardware generations)
  * Diverse OSes (Linux & FreeBSD)
  * Diverse DNS software: BIND, NSD, and ATLAS
I don't know how they decide the exact configurations here, but the idea is that a single vulnerability or bug is unlikely to cause a full outage at the POP.

The complexity here is immense and they must have a really great system for managing the configurations and replicating DNS changes. It certainly would not be cheap to build.

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Re:Ask HN: ICANN charges only 18¢ per domain name, why am I ... by gist on Friday December 18, 2015 @04:21PM (#10761030)
Exactly. It is a complex system built from scratch from the days when it was Network Solutions which evolved into Verisign and had a contract with the US Government. Which by the way no other company was interested in at the time.
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