Free and freemium services seem to be dropping like flies. Recently Google Apps stopped being free, then in almost a whisper, Microsoft Live Mail stopped offering free mail hosting. Now, in a move, I didn’t see coming DynDNS killed its free offering a few weeks ago. This is pretty significant because of the usefulness this free service provided to many. Read on for more about this change.
On April 7th, DynDNS announced this change with a blog post describing why. The core reasons behind this being increased abuse, and just money. Naturally, money is always a big one.
My first introduction to DynDNS was as a user of their free dynamic DNS service. It was my exposure to this product (which tightened over the years) that lead me to their current standard DNS service. Over that time I have brought them quite a number of domains and money for the value they provide as a DNS service. Sadly, the DNS services themselves have been changed and rates have risen, while seemingly unnecessary product tiers and limits were introduced.
This is so important in a hyper-competitive environment where many providers are simply offering DNS services for free (with a hosting package) and tools to manage these DNS services are becoming more powerful. This may end up relegating the once useful DynDNS to service in need of a market. I’m not familiar with DynDNS’s other offerings, but it would make sense that they might get into the domain registrations of other types of hosting.
As was the case with Logmein, this move is all too familiar, and generally flies in the face of the users that helped make the company popular, to begin with. There is a basic bargain these services make with users, and alienating them, runs the risk of destroying the future and current paying base.
The Free Dynamic DNS service will officially turn down on May 7th, 2014. Those who donated to the service early on will continue to make use of accounts they have.