How do we do what we do? Why should other hackers bow before us? Why should you choose us? The executive summary is the ability to be in more than one place at once, a whole lot of quality hardware, and Open Source software everywhere it'll fit.
The first thing of interest is our physical presence. The Internet is a big place, with many ways to get from where you started to where you want to go. It's also a place where lots of things can go wrong, a veritable packet graveyard. So it makes sense that No-IP's facilities are located in multiple locations for performance and availability. Plus we like to travel. Not really. Our main servers are in the heart of San Diego, but our DNS and monitoring systems have additional locations in Chicago, New York, San Antonio, and London. At all locations, we use only the highest quality equipment. We use F5 Networks equipment for application load balancing, Cisco routers and switches for IP connectivity and Supermicro for dependable servers. We also provide a nutritious breakfast so that our staff is alert and perky at all times. Really.
The next question you might have is "what's running on all this equipment." As a DNS and mail provider, we need rock solid software to power those services. As a web service, we need to write web pages on the fly and serve them to thousands of viewers. We need to keep databases of customer information--a LOT of it. Finally, we have to perform behind-the-scenes administrative work, which is harder than it looks. A lot of web shops use proprietary solutions for these tasks, but we've felt from the outset that those solutions are the wrong way to go. The Open Source movement has produced tools that do these tasks with lower cost, higher quality and greater freedom. No-IP has always been an advocate for Open Source software. We not only use it, we write it too.
Our use of Open Source starts at underpinnings of our systems: the operating system. Early on, we chose Red Hat Linux for its reliability, support and security. Four years later, we're still a 100% Red Hat shop.
No-IP uses the Apache httpd server software as the basis of our web presence. We suggest you use it too, unless you're a competitor, in which case we suggest you use something obsolete and broken. It's hard to overstate the importance of Apache. 63% of the world's web servers run it and it essentially IS the web. The server is fast, secure and easy to modify. We use it everywhere, hooked up to a database and server side programming language we'll talk about shortly.
Along with Apache, we use MySQL database to store information. MySQL is another cornerstone in the Open Source toolbox. Until about four years ago, people who needed the power of a SQL database faced a bleak landscape. The market was controlled by a small number of vendors who charged very high prices for software that needed equally expensive hardware to run it. Nascent service providers with big ideas but small budgets were in a quandary. Many were forced to use databases that couldn't scale and were unmanageable. MySQL was a breath of fresh air, offering outstanding performance without the heavy system footprint and administrative complexity of the commercial offerings. Perhaps most importantly it was (and is) free. No-IP's MySQL databases hold customer configurations (3 million rows worth), our DNS information and our Email and monitoring settings.
For our core name services, we use the most evolved DNS software around, BIND--the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon. The latest version, BIND 9, is well established as a performance and security bedrock. In fact, the server network that handles the root-level domains (.com, .org, and .net) runs BIND. No-IP uses this same software to answer over four billion DNS queries a month
Another key No-IP service is email. Here again, we use an open source tool, but it's not the mail transport you might expect. Instead of the venerable Sendmail, we use Qmail, which is so secure that a $500 reward for a found exploit has never been claimed. Since the rise of spam and viruses, a modern email system spends a lot of time figuring out what NOT to send. To help keep your mail spam-free we use the software and services provided by Spam Cop, SpamHaus, Spam Assassin and DSpam. To ward off viruses, we use Clam AntiVirus, which is a lot less seedy than it sounds.
No-IP uses two different programming languages, each suited to a particular set of tasks. For our web pages, we use PHP, a language designed specifically to be embedded in HTML and executed as the page as being served. PHP is easy to learn, powerful and can be pre-compiled for speed. When you use No-IP's web site, the pages you see are generated right then and there by PHP. It provides our "public" face.
For back end work, we write code in Perl. This language has been around for a long time and arouses strong emotions in any programmer with more than a passing familiarity with it. Its text processing capabilities are legendary, only matched by other languages that simply copy it. Yet Perl code itself can be written in such a compact and idiomatic style that it is unreadable, a sort of computer Cockney. Some people, naturally enough, do this for fun, although others who use and modify this sort of code routinely find it infuriating. Perl is infinitely capable, maddening and simply indispensable. We use it for many tasks that simply can't be done any other way.
Finally, we also produce some Open Source software. Our primary effort is the Dynamic Update Client, which our users run to keep their server's names updated in DNS. This program is available for both UNIX and Windows. The UNIX version is Open Source under the GNU General Public License and will remain so. We also contribute to other Open Source projects hosted at Sorceforge.net.
This concludes our technology overview. We hope you enjoyed this document. No offshore labor, animal by-products or asbestos were used in its production.