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Ask HN: Is .io domain unstable?

31 points by katzeilla ↗ HN
After searched on HN, I found many people were not satisfied about the stability of .io domains.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=.io+domain

So, should I use a .io domain for my site? Or I should use something else?

17 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] thread
[dead] renyinew
it's to expensive for personal site
em-bee
there are now hundreds of top-level vanity domains. plenty of good ones that rival .io. pick any you like.
kzzy
Any suggestions?
em-bee
that really depends on what you want to do with the site. some are clearly oriented towards a specific area such as tech, business, or entertainment, and some are more generic that could be used for anything, some are pure vanity.
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sandstrom
They’ve had multiple large DNS outages during the past couple of years.

Stable is relative, of course, it’s still going to be online more than 99.9% of the time, but compared to e.g. .com or the myriad of other ccTLDs they’ve been fairly unstable.

We ended up switching domain for our service, because they (.io) caused our only two outages during a one-year period.

vfc1
I've been using it for years and never noticed anything. But I think it's a good idea as a precaution to leave only things like landing pages in the IO domain, and setup the API or dashboard app in a separate .com domain.

I remember reading in some comment here on HN I think that their support does not reply on weekends.

Hydraulix989
How are some TLDs less stable than others? Isn't DNS distributed? (I'm not a networking engineer.)
kevingadd
If you have a domain under .io or .com you're relying on the root servers for that TLD to be run properly.

For .io, for example, these appear to be the roots: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/io.html

You also risk having bad things happen to your domain as a result of social engineering or other problems at the administrator and the risk of that may vary between TLDs since they're run by different companies.

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mey
Each Top level domain has an administrator responsible for running that tld. Including running it's DNS. The root domain ".", routes the request to the correct TLD DNS server. So technically, first you ask the root server for the DNS server of .com, then ask .com for google.com, etc. (Technically the DNS entry is google.com. )

.com is administrated by Verisign.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d... has more info.

em-bee
simplified, dns being distributed means that an outage in one domain doesn't affect an outage in another domain. but each domain still can and should protect itself against outages by having multiple servers for that domain.

a second level domain is usually required to provide at least two DNS servers for that domain. a top level domain like .io better have a dozen or more spread over multiple networks.

mike_d
The DNS for .io is (now) operated by Afilias on their anycast network. It is the same network of servers that are operating .org, .info, and a few dozen other TLDs.

Despite any support or administrative issues you may encounter, the technical infrastructure is sound.

[dead] timwayne16
Choose a Better Paid .com Domain
wolf550e
The io cctld authoritative dns servers are not very competently run. There have also been security issues like https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...

'tptacek would add that a cctld that is under control of the five eyes governments is less secure because the registry can be interfered with more easily than .com, though I think that's kinda theoretical.