ChangeIP, which refers to itself as a "rockstar, low-cost and high-touch web host," has hit a sour note with customers over the past few days.
The company on Monday afternoon reported that it "suffered a system wide DB failure that cascaded to all of our DB systems. Restore been on going since yesterday [Sunday, Dec. 11]." ChangeIP said that due to the size of its MySQL database, recovery was taking longer than anticipated and it was hard to say when a total restore would take place. Early on Tuesday (eastern time), the company said its DNS service had been restored, but that it was still working to restore its database and get web, dynamic DNS and control panel functions back in working order.
While the provider of free and premium DNS services has been around since 1999 and claimed in an April press release about new security-themed offerings to have had 100,000 customers since its launch, the ChangeIP outage has not sparked the widespread reaction that some other outages have this year (i.e., Level 3, Dyn).
Though some customers did express their disappointment: One wrote to ChangeIP on Twitter: "As DNS is a critical infrastructure, we really need poeple in this space to do better." Another wrote to us: "Not only have they been down, but they've completely mismanaged the whole event, leaving customers in the dark for hours on-end. Customers are stuck because the DNS records are hosed so service can't be transferred to new providers. It's a mess."
As of Tuesday morning on the east coast, ChangeIP's own main website page was not accessible. As one technology administrator wrote on Twitter Monday: "Pretty crazy how @ChangeIPcom cannot even get there own site up and running #dnsfail changeip.com"