$ dig @8.8.8.8 ns2.p29.dynect.net

  ; <<>> DiG 9.7.3-P3-RedHat-9.7.3-8.P3.el6 <<>> @8.8.8.8 ns2.p29.dynect.net
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 2690
  ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;ns2.p29.dynect.net.		IN	A

  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  dynect.net.		600	IN	SOA	ns0.dynamicnetworkservices.net. hostmaster.dyndns.com. 2015070600 10800 1800 604800 1800

  ;; Query time: 2 msec
  ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
  ;; WHEN: Mon Jul  6 21:42:48 2015
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 120

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-internet-is-a-cooperative-sy...

edit: resolved now.

    $ dig +short NS heroku.com    
    ns1.p19.dynect.net.
    ns4.p19.dynect.net.
    ns3.p19.dynect.net.
    ns2.p19.dynect.net.

You might want to try putting it behind a CDN to cope with the load

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/m8hf8q8vs81d

I see the big blurb about DNS at the top. But it still feels like the table is misleading. When they're having a major DNS outage and every site is "operational" it feels misleading.

Although if this was Amazon's AWS console we wouldn't even have the blurb at the top...

But since CloudFlare has not indicated any downtime, everything still appears up.

E.g. https://myappname.herokuapp.com

Can I ask a question while we wait for Cloudflare to fix this... Heroku looks nice. But also quite expensive after you add on dyno, Postgre/Redis, and "addons." What about Heroku do you like/appreciate that justifies the slightly higher costs? Or do you just like that all of the devops-style stuff is handled by them (as opposed to AWS/Azure/Linode, etc where you'd have to do it yourself).

I am genuinely asking, I have no reason to dislike Heroku, and I know it is quite popular. Just trying to understand what the "value add" is over other cloud services (or why they're dissimilar).

Please don't feel obliged to answer, but if you have the time it would be appreciated/interesting.

With Heroku (frankly also thanks to Ruby on Rails) I can be a sys-admin, developer, database administrator and QA all at once; far easier than before. For the price of $100k I have seen developers build successful products that used to cost $1M+ to develop.

On Heroku you definitely pay for convenience and ease of use, knowing that you get a benefit in doing so by being able to focus on the development of your app, the part that matters. The costs grow if you get traffic, but through careful management (such as packing multiple processes into one dyno), you can reduce costs. Even if many find Heroku's prices high, they are still much lower than what you see in enterprise land, or even on AWS if you aren't careful.

Heroku's documentation is also incredibly good, and this helps you a lot to move fast. Almost by accident, simply by following Heroku documentation I have found that developers end up following good cloud server practices almost by default (i.e. because Heroku forces you to build your app to follow certain conventions, conventions needed for making your app horizontally scaleable; such as delegating clock processes to a separate process, and not allowing dynos to manipulate or rely on unique file memory specific only to them).

If I architectured or configured my own servers it would have taken 10x as long, exposed me to far more security issues, and I would have probably screwed it up any way. The lesson from this is that I think as developers we need far less freedom to configure than we think we need.

So in conclusion, if you're a small to medium-sized app that does not have complex server or bandwidth needs (i.e. you are not Imgur or Pied Piper), then I highly recommend it. I'm sure many Oracle salesman will be unhappy with this opinion, but take my word for it that the vast majority of applications do not need complex, overengineered server systems to be successful. (After all as a startup, you should not be wasting months planning on how you will scale to support 10 million concurrent users. I've seen that hubris distract failing startups before.)

Unfortunately, Heroku is down constantly. Don't take my word for it; google "Heroku down" and see how often it occurs.

Microsites? Sure. Hobby sites? Sure. Business applications that generate revenue? Good luck.

Ello is a recent app that had to scale to millions of users extremely quickly and did on Heroku. Read their technical write up: http://mikepackdev.com/blog_posts/40-5-early-lessons-from-ra...

Ello had issues, and Heroku would be considered amateur for what they were doing, but if you read it Heroku was not the cause of their performance issues -- their application code was. IMO most business applications run into problems due to performance issues within their application code, not because of server downtime.

Regarding how common downtime on Heroku is... yes, Heroku has lots of minor incidents impairing its toolkit and some services, but these are not issues that go notices. Two years in I still haven't had significant downtime from Heroku itself (more than 5 minutes) during business hours where it matters. Cloudflare, and other DNS providers, have frankly given me more trouble.

Also, is there any way to actually resolve this issue quickly while Cloudflare deals with their fuckup? I don't like being at the mercy of their support team while my site has literal downtime.

It's not a question of trust; at some point, any single provider will get DDoSed or have an operational bug.

The only question is whether you're willing to accept that. If you are, then try to pick one great provider.

If you're not, and are willing to spend a little time to avoid this problem, try to pick two great providers. Since then, DNSimple has made primary/secondary providers even easier: https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/secondary-dns/

Basically, if you don't want this problem, don't pick one provider. It's not bulletproof, but it's a lot closer.

I have not used it but, as I understand it, the feature helps you setup slave servers which respond to Notify messages from DNSimple. That way, if they go down, your slave provider will keep things up.

Learn basic troubleshooting so you can determine which vendor is the problem (ie not Cloudflare in this case).