Way way back in the history of PowerDNS, we bought the full suite of domain names for our new company: powerdns.com, powerdns.net, powerdns.org. Alternate names for the company we considered at the time were ‘SuperDNS’ and ‘UltraDNS’. We later found out that SuperDNS was the internal name over at Verisign for what is now the Atlas software that powers the COM and NET servers. And UltraDNS eventually became a DNS company in its own right!

Over time we no longer used powerdns.org and eventually the domain lapsed by accident and was quickly picked up by folks that held it ransom for a decade or so, without ever using it. I (Bert) personally always had issues with paying up to get the domain back, and over the years some very unsavoury parties ended up owning powerdns.org.

Recently we decided it was time to get the .org back anyhow and after negotiating for a few days we finally paid up, and shortly after that we were back in control of powerdns.org, at a cost of $1000.

This personally left me with a bad aftertaste since effectively we have paid a chain of people that specialise in taking over domains for ransom purposes.

To compensate for all this, we’ve decided to donate $1000 to the Doctors without Borders charity. On doing the currency conversion I felt bad about that too, so we turned it into a €1000 donation.

So welcome back powerdns.org and hopefully we’ve atoned for our mistake a decade ago!