What's New at DNSimple — Fall 2024

It's time again for another DNSimple Feature Focus! The last few months, the team has been rolling out enhancements to make it easier to download your domain data, provide more visibility into verifying your domain resolution, and improve our cache edge network. We're also excited to share that our CEO, Anthony, chatted with Scott Hanselman last month about DNSimple and all things DNS for his Hanselminutes podcast — listen to the conversation.

Let's take a quick look at what we've improved, simplified, and added. Click the links in any of the sections below to learn more. If you're not using DNSimple yet, find the right plan for you, and give all these features and more a try free for 30 days.

.CSV exports

A lot of you wrote in asking for an easier way to export your domain data into a .CSV file. While we'd previously created a script you could use to populate Google sheets with some of this information, it required multiple steps, only returned domains registered with DNSimple, and you risked having too many queries. Our new export feature does all of this, and returns all domains in your account, without you needing to worry about rate limits on our API.

Now you can download a .CSV file of your domain names, right from your domain page. The file includes domain registration, zone details, pricing, and more. You can find a full breakdown in our support article.

Cache edge improvements

In March 2023, we revealed initial work to develop an internally managed authoritative DNS cache edge to supplement our existing cache edge and further diversify our network topology, and we've accomplished a lot since that announcement.

DNSimple's name servers are now being powered by two different cache edge networks, working together to provide a heavily redundant anycast DNS network:

• ns1.dnsimple.com and ns3.dnsimple.com are being served by the third-party cache edge network.
• ns2.dnsimple.com and ns4.dnsimple.com are being served by DNSimple's cache edge network.

The new hostnames, ns2.dnsimple-edge.net and ns4.dnsimple-edge.org, have been created to represent NS2 and NS4 respectively. These hostnames use a completely separate domain name, with a mixed set of TLDs, to further increase the network diversity and reduce the impact on any registry-level DNS outage. We strongly recommend using them instead of their ns2.dnsimple.com and ns4.dnsimple.com counterparts. You can visit DNSimple's name server documentation to stay up-to-date with all the current configurations. Read this post for all the details.

Verifying domain resolution

When you make a change to your domain, you expect it to take effect. Unfortunately, there are some scenarios where, for one reason or another, your changes fail to apply, causing confusion and frustration, and forcing you to contact support to resolve the issue after multiple unsuccessful attempts. This wasn't ideal, so we changed the process.

Now, we run a series of verifications before any change is applied to your domain's DNS zone to ensure that the change will take effect as expected. If we detect any issues, a list of failed verifications will appear, along with the actions you need to take for your domain to resolve. No more guessing, no more needing to contact support. Just follow the steps in the alert, and you'll be good to go. You'll find a breakdown of this feature along with potential errors in this support article.

Hanselminutes podcast

Our CEO, Anthony, chatted with Scott Hanselman about DNS, domains, and DNSimple for his Hanselminutes podcast. Scott has trusted DNSimple with his domains for over a decade, and we cannot begin to say how much we appreciate his support.

If you've ever been curious about DNSimple, or why you need a DNS service that's focused on DNS and domain management, this podcast is for you. We loved listening to this conversation, and we think you will too (and like Scott, we also think you should check out howhttps.works).

"I do recommend [DNSimple] personally, and I have for years. You can find my tweets going back 15 years; DNSimple, whether it be one domain or a hundred thousand domains. Also Fantastic SSL certificate management now makes it super, super easy to not have to think about your domains." - Scott Hanselman

Stay tuned for more

Find the latest from DNSimple on the Features page of our blog, and never miss a new release. Feel free to drop us a line with features you'd like to see us add — we always appreciate hearing from you.

With all the updates we've been rolling out, now is the perfect time to sign up. Give us a try free for 30 days, and see what all the fuss is about.

And as always, if you have any questions about your DNS configuration, domain management, or the new features, get in touch — we'd love to help.

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Anthony Eden

I break things so Simone continues to have plenty to do. I occasionally have useful ideas, like building a domain and DNS provider that doesn't suck.