Paid DNS Services
This is a question we’ve received many times from both new and existing customers alike. With the internet the way that it is, there are always substitutes for anything you use on your computer. From your operating system, your email, your word processor, to the way you stream online videos, if you look hard enough, you’ll most probably find something else that can do the same job and more often that not, there is a free alternative.
From our perspective, when looking at free services, we find it vitally important to understand the motive behind the product or service, what is the person or organisation gaining from providing something for free? What is their pay back, if you will.
We’ve been using Gmail since the beginning, and it is a great service, however, one has to accept that Google are going through your inbox and tailoring every Google advert you see based on it’s analysis of your email and your surfing habits, eventually you get to a point where your start considering paid non-intrusive services. Likewise Facebook, Whatsapp and a pretty much every other major service online, they are are free to use, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost.
In the case of software there is very little, if any correlation between the number of users of the software and the cost involved in creating or maintaining it. However for services, this is not the case. With an internet delivered service, there is an incremental cost for every additional active user, whether it is CPU power, memory, disk space, or bandwidth, if someone is using a service, someone, somewhere, has to pick up those costs.
In our case, it is a simple commercial arrangement, we’ve worked out the costs involved in providing our service and have set out prices accordingly, as the number of customers grow, our income grows as well as our overheads, hopefully, if we have done our homework, there is a little bit left over for us 🙂
If you take the case of one of our competitors – Hola – it sounds like a great proposition. A free unblocking tool that allows you to choose where you are on the internet and bypass any local or geographic restrictions. However, when you install their service, you are actually entering into a peer to peer arrangement with all the other Hola users and your are effectively sharing your local internet connection with them. You have no control over what sites they access or what they do online, but they have full use of your connection. Add to that the fact that the software is not open source and has not been submitted for peer review and you get a slightly different picture of the costs involved in this free service.
We may be cynics, but if it sounds to good to be true, it usually is.
BTW please don’t confuse this with Open Source Software, which is an entirely different proposition, we totally support the open source movement and try to use open source products wherever possible as well as contributing to many open source projects.
Some other things you may want to consider when weighing up the proposition of a paid service like ours versus a free service:
We believe that customer service is hugely important. It may only be a $4 service, but that doesn’t mean you should expect anything other than excellence in all your dealings with us. Our customer service team works around the clock to ensure you get a prompt and courteous response to any issues you may have. After all, you pay us for the service and therefore you deserve a professional response.
If the situation warrants it, we can, with your permission and assistance, connect remotely to resolve any issues you may be having.
You simply will not get anywhere near our level of customer service with a free DNS provider, indeed many of our paid competitors don’t even come close.
With our SimpleTelly DNS service, you will be able to achieve full HD content streaming with very minimal effort, provided your Internet speed meets the minimum requirements set by the content provider.
Having said that, speed without reliability is also pretty pointless. We can’t imagine watching a show in 1080p but stopping every few seconds to buffer. Sure, you get great quality, but we won’t be having a great time watching anything, would we?
From our experience with free services, because they are free, there are times where you’ll get unsatisfactory performance or even servers that change every few months or weeks. For some people, randomly searching for free DNS services is fine, they don’t mind doing all the hard work. But in our opinion, having to constantly look for new servers will eventually begin to frustrate, especially if you want to just settle down after a long day at work and watch TV.
While our DNS service does not provide the same measure of security as a VPN, we use secure, dedicated servers located in 26 countries around the world to provide it. The issue we’ve found with many free alternatives is that they actually provide a peer to peer based service instead of using dedicated servers. Among other things, this ensures that their service remains free and it also decreases any running costs they may face.
Information is a valuable asset and is one aspect that some providers can look to monetise. We are paid to provide a DNS service and that is what we do. Our privacy policy openly states what information we collect and what it is used for, it also openly states that we will never share your information with any other party and we will certainly never sell your information. In general, free services do not provide these assurances.
We know there are hundreds if not thousands of web streaming websites and apps out there and often times with free services, if you happen to stumble upon any site that you wish to access but are incapable of doing so due to lack of support, there usually isn’t any way to request that those websites be supported by their service as it is provided free as it is.
This isn’t the case with SimpleTelly because if there are any geographical restrictions in place on websites that our service does not yet support, all you need to do is get in contact with our support team, let us know the link that you’d like to access and we’ll get to work on lifting the geographical restriction right away!
In our first month, in response to requests from our customers, we have added more than 17 new streaming services to our list! That’s 17 extra channels that, if you used a free service, you might not have been able to watch, and this is just a normal week. Head on over to our supported services menu and check out the full list of channels we support that are available on a variety of different devices!
While we believe these reasons are enough to justify our subscription fee, you can always give our free trial a go and let us know how you feel about it.
You might be interested to know How to watch Netflix legally outside the US
