Bootstrapping

As we have been working towards getting service we can show publicly together (minimum viable product, or MVP, in startup lingo), we are increasingly excited about switching to our new system our selves. At Reveal IT, we manage over a hundred domain names on behalf of clients, friends and family, and managing these with existing tools have proven to be a time consuming, error prone, and anxiety-inducingly burden.

A common scenario is that an imaginary client, say choam.com have outgrown their current web server and need a new one. We help them manage their DNS. We will spend hours just fiddling with DNS settings for this. choam.com is localised into many languages, and besides the choam.net and choam.org, they also own 42 ccTLD domain names (choam.dk, choam.co.uk, etc).
All these will need to be updated.

The day before the big switch, all these domains will have to have the TTL for their main A-record decreased, so the changeover will not result in too much downtime for their customers. This might take 3-4 clicks per domain. That is a lot of clicking, and when the day finally arrives, we’ll have to change it back again. After the changeover, we then realise that we had missed maoch.fr when changing DNS for their domain names. Oops, ~12 hours of downtime for all their customers in France.

It’s not that we’re particularly clumsy, it’s just that any complicated process that rely on human effort is bound to break down sooner or later. Our focus is to make your DNS configuration more logical, requiring fewer manual steps and providing a much better overview on what domains are configured how.

We’re looking forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks. The first public preview will be during a presentation by Mikkel Høgh, one of our founders, at DrupalCon Munich where this site will be displayed as an example on how you can build powerful web applications on top of Drupal and Node.js. We will share the video from that occation here on our blog when it becomes available.