DNS Hosting Upgrade for Paid/Permanent users

[februaryfour]

Title
DNS Hosting Upgrade for Paid/Permanent users

Short, concise description of the idea
Provide a paid add-on DNS hosting option for users.

Full description of the idea
BackgroundAs a semi-professional author attempting to "go pro", I registered my own domain name. I've spent five or six years on Livejournal, and I really do love the site, so I

Comments

[azurelunatic]

While this is the same general concept as http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/771794.html, this suggestion is defined in more detail and is clearer to understand.

[februaryfour]

Ah--I hadn't thought to search via the "embedding" tag, but yes, it is indeed the same problem/concept. I also note that the other suggestion is listed as "duplicate"--I presume this suggestion has come up MANY times. *chuckle*

[azurelunatic]

Generally, we try to not allow duplicates through more often than every three years, but occasionally either it happens, or, as in this case, we do on purpose. The previous suggestion was reasonably clear to someone who was already familiar with the concept, but gathered a good amount of confusion in the comments.

[februaryfour]

I think it's timely, too--Wordpress is gathering momentum, and Dreamwidth is nearing public launch. Livejournal has an amazing community, but everyone else is breathing down LJ's neck. Some of the recent PR disasters didn't help either. This will hopefully keep the scales firmly tipped to LJ's side, since it would show LJ is listening, won't it? (*smacks head* Oh, duh, that was another advantage I could have added. Oh well, it's sort-of covered...)

Thank you so much for the speed of moderation, by the way. You rock. ♥

[ayoub]

+1

[pauamma]

Speaking from my experience supporting a similar feature on another blogging platform: it's very hard for users to get it right, because most DNS registrars or registries give conflicting or unclear instructions. (Also, there are several ways to do it, some never work, some work in some cases only, and it's hard for an outside party to know which work in which case. Also also, it can be very hard to get an outside party to pay attention when you ask the customer to pass them "This is what your customer needs to do. Forget what you think they need to do and tell them how to do what I say, using your service's user interface." information. Not to mention unfair to the customer.)

Which is to say: if this can be done at little or no cost, it would be great.

[azurelunatic]

Having worked the other side of that, I sympathize.

[trempnvt]

I don't know that I would use it, but I like the idea.

[gerg]

I think this could be extended to adding a domain registrar and letting people register Real Domain Names for their journals with us handling the support and the domain.

Right now, domain aliasing and embedding are both almost ludicrously difficult for a regular user to understand or set up properly. A lot of work needs to go into these features, and an integrated "Point your domain name to us and it'll look like yours" feature that lets people just deal with one company would add significant value.

In fact, I may suggest that separately >_>

[azurelunatic]

Fascinating idea. I don't believe that's come up before. And before you jump into the suggestions queue, I am curious (for the implementation/disadvantages concepts) how much experience you have in the domain name industry, and whether you'd have LJ set up as a registrar itself (more control, possibly more start-up costs and red tape) or sign on with an already-accredited registrar and get basically an LJ-branded reseller scenario (quicker, probably cheaper to start up, less control), and probably a few other details. Feel free to tackle me in IRC, as I have some small knowledge of the domain industry as it was as of November (I haven't been keeping up since).

[pauamma]

I'm interested in joining that discussion when it happens. I worked supporting the blogging platform end of a similar feature that used separate, manual configuration steps for the blog side and the DNS side. (See comment rantlet above.)

[gerg]

I didn't see you posting here; feel free to respond to my comment below or we'll poke you if Azz pings me in IRC.