[Pdns-announce] State of PowerDNS + Survey of use (please fill out!)

[bert hubert]

Dear PowerDNS people,

Every once in while we like to send out an update, and ask you how you use
PowerDNS. Please read our news and questions below!

Table of Contents
-----------------
1. Survey
2. New website 
3. Presentation at DENIC online
4. PowerDNS use booming
5. Sponsoring, changes to our support policy
6. PowerDNS Express now 'for pay'
7. DNSSEC developments
8. PowerDNS future

1. Survey
---------
PowerDNS can be downloaded for free, but we still need to know about our
users to determine our future development and business plans. Therefore we
ask you to answer the following questions, please email your answers to
sales at powerdns.com. We will never reveal your name, company or email
address, all we are interested in are statistics.

1) What operating systems do you run PowerDNS on?

2) Is better Windows support important to you?

3) How many domains do you serve with PowerDNS? How many records?

4) Which backend(s) do you use?

5) What, in your opinion, is the biggest missing feature of PowerDNS?

6) And the best feature?

7) If you have a PowerDNS support agreement, does it satisfy your needs? If
not, can you tell us of reasons that could make you consider entering into a
support agreement? 

8) Are you considering moving more of your systems to PowerDNS? Or
conversely, are you considering switching to another program? If so, why?

2. New website
--------------
After about three years of no changes to our website, our sister-company
Trilab is now kindly hosting http://www.PowerDNS.com on their Allonline
platform, it looks a lot prettier now. Besides the professional website,
there is community support and access to the source on
http://wiki.powerdns.com.

3. Presentation at DENIC online
-------------------------------
Last week Bert Hubert made a presentation about PowerDNS at the DENIC
Technical meeting, which was well attended. About 10% of those present
indicated their use of PowerDNS. The presentation can be seen on
http://ds9a.nl/powerdns-denic.pdf

4. PowerDNS use booming
-----------------------
At the DENIC meeting an informal survey was released which states that
between 49 and 51% of the German .de domains is powered by PowerDNS. DENIC
makes no recommendation and this survey is not their official position, but
this shows how far PowerDNS has come in the past few years.

There are strong indications that the PowerDNS world-wide domain market
share is bigger than 10%, and higher in Europe.

5. Sponsoring, changes in our support policy
--------------------------------------------
PowerDNS users can ask questions on our mailinglist and in many cases we or
other PowerDNS users will answer them. Furthermore, we've also been
answering questions from PowerDNS users privately. We are abandoning this
free private service.

>From now on, you'll need a support contract for private answers. Terms and
conditions are available via sales at powerdns.com. Our rates should be
negligible compared to your DNS-related revenue.

We'll still be around on the mailinglists however! PowerDNS will remain open
source, but we are also a company that needs revenue in order to develop
PowerDNS further.

Furthermore, PowerDNS users can also sponsor new features. We've done so
recently for two customers, Register.com and PowerDNS - if there is
something special you need but which is not happening out of its own accord,
feel free to contact us to see if we can work something out.

6. PowerDNS Express now 'for pay'
---------------------------------
A domain control panel was offered for free on http://express.powerdns.com.
We still offer the service, but will no longer waive fees. Given the current
climate on the internet, offering free services is generating more abuse
email traffic than we can handle for free. Initial reaction to our new rates
has been very positive with many previous free users switching to a paid
package. Over time, non-paying domains will be disabled and ultimately
deleted, but we'll send out more warnings before this happens.

The new revenue allows us to improve PowerDNS Express services, as well as
maintain our servers.

7. DNSSEC developments
----------------------
As previously announced, we are again looking into DNSSEC. If you or your
company is using, or planning to use, PowerDNS and has DNSSEC plans, please
drop us a line. Implementing DNSSEC is a major amount of work and before we
embark on it we'd like to know the level of interest.

8. Future of PowerDNS
---------------------
The future appears very bright. Download numbers are increasing at a
great rate and far more domains are being served by PowerDNS than even
a few months ago - in some countries more than half.

We also note more contributions from the PowerDNS community, with notable
recent work by Mark Bergsma (as used by the Wikipedia), Norbert Sendetzky
(LinuxNetworks.de) and Marc Jauvin (Register4Less), for which we are
grateful, thanks!

However, for our continued well-being we'd like to urge you to consider
either a support contract or to sponsor new features. If your project or
company depends on PowerDNS, supporting us makes all kinds of sense.

Please contact sales at powerdns.com if you want to benefit from private
support, sponsor new features or simply donate to enhance PowerDNS
developments!

Kind regards,

The PowerDNS Team.