OpenDNS Deluxe Dropped, Price Increase by 900%

The popular third party DNS provider OpenDNS has been sending out emails in January to part of its customer base announcing an upcoming change in the company’s portfolio. OpenDNS Basic, which was used by home users and businesses alike, has been redesigned as a product for home use only. The product will remain free and offer the same functionality as before. The email was worded in a way that suggested that content filtering was removed from the product on March 15th.

Only businesses are however affected by this. If they have received the email, they will be without content filtering from March 15th forward should they not switch to the paid Enterprise plan. The email only mentions OpenDNS Enterprise as the alternative, and not the companies OpenDNS Deluxe service.

OpenDNS’s CEO David Ulevitch mentioned in a post on Reddit that OpenDNS decided to drop that product. This has consequences for businesses who paid $150 per year for the OpenDNS Deluxe plan as they are left with two options if they want to stay at the company.

The first option is to go back to OpenDNS Premium (which is OpenDNS Home but without the filtering for businesses). The second to subscribe to the Open DNS Enterprise plan instead. The starting price for the Enterprise product is set to $1500 per year for companies with 1-50 users. This could mean a 900% increase for companies who paid 150$ per year for the deluxe plan previously.

A 30% discount was offered to OpenDNS Deluxe customers, and even more for customers who complained loudly. The discount would still mean a price increase of of more than 300% for the product.

To paraphrase:

• Home users: OpenDNS Home, with filtering included, nothing changes.
• Businesses: Either OpenDNS Premium, which only offers DNS services, or OpenDNS Enterprise starting at $1500 with filtering and advanced malware and botnet protection services.

The biggest user complaint is the pricing for the Enterprise product. Smaller businesses with a handful of employees would have to pay as much as larger sized businesses with 40 or even 50 employees.

Businesses looking for an alternative should take a look at the comparison chart over at DNS Redirector which compares popular DNS services.

Internet Giants Consider SOPA Strike

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

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© Mike Halsey MVP for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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