BIND Subscription

What is a BIND Subscription?

BIND itself is free, open source software. However, we recommend our commercial software support contract to get the most out of it.

Why pay for support for free open source software?

Maximize Efficiency, Minimize Risk

The foundation of a stable online business is a solid critical Internet infrastructure. Whether your organization requires 100% uptime, fast response worldwide, or resiliency against cyber attacks and threats, a BIND Subscription helps you achieve those goals efficiently.

Expert Support by the Maintainers of BIND, ISC’s Name Server Software

With a BIND subscription, your IT team can get definitive answers to technical questions efficiently, from the software’s authors, and share configuration details confidentially, instead of surfing the web and posting publicly on mailing lists.

Sustain the Open Source You Rely On

The DNS is complicated, and maintaining and supporting BIND is not free. ISC employs a professional staff to test, develop, support and release BIND. Our engineers participate in standards bodies (we have authored over 60 IETF RFCs) and industry fora such as Nanog, UKNOF, LISA/USENIX etc, in an effort to keep evolving BIND as the Internet evolves. We try to maintain a faithful reference implementation, and to diligently pursue reports of any serious errors or potential security vulnerabilities, fix and report them. We take our responsibility for the health of the Internet seriously.

If you rely on BIND, it is your responsibility to also contribute to maintaining this critical bit of the Internet infrastructure. While we do also welcome donations, we get nearly all our financial support from paid subscriptions for open source support. Unlike a foundation, or advertising-supported business, this keeps us focused on our core mission, enabling the Internet and serving the users of our software.

Subscriber Benefits:

• Professional Technical Support
  Our team of technical support engineers will help you troubleshoot problems, escalate and track bug reports.  Annually, if you choose, they will review your configuration and point out any concerns.
• Priority Bug Fixes and Engineering Support
  As an ISC support customer, you will receive prioritized bug fixes and patches to keep your business online.
• Subscription Branch Software
  Subscribers have access to an unpublished branch of the BIND software with new, added-value features.  These will change over time, as we will periodically re-integrate with the main open source branch and start a new subscriber-only branch.  Your feedback on the new features will help shape our roadmap.
• Advance Notification of Security Vulnerabilities
  Receive up to 5 days advance notice before ISC publishes information on a BIND security vulnerability, with a patch. This gives you time to plan and schedule an update to your infrastructure, before any potential exploiters find out about the vulnerability.

BIND Subscription Levels 

Click to download subscription data sheet

What is a BIND subscription?

Advance Security Notification

All our BIND support subscriptions include early notification of critical security vulnerabilities, before the vulnerability is made public.  After a vulnerability is reported and verified, we work around the clock on a solution. Then, we schedule a public announcement. As much as five days BEFORE the public announcement, (at least 3 business days) we notify our subscribers of the problem, individually and privately, and offer them a revised version of BIND that fixes the problem. This gives legitimate organizations that require a working Internet presence, adequate time to upgrade their systems before the vulnerability is publicly announced.

Technical Support

BIND Subscription beyond the Basic level also gives you access to support and bug fixes from the authors of BIND.  In the absence of this support, you can always search the internet, or post questions on our popular mailing list, bind-users@lists.isc.org, or another public mailing list.  If you subscribe, however, we can look at log files and other information from you, we will prioritize bugs that affect you, and you can get help efficiently and privately, without posting your company critical systems information on the Internet. In addition, we will review your configuration annually, if you desire, to help you identify potential problems and optimize your DNS.

Influence our Roadmap

We are much better able to serve those users with whom we have a technical support relationship, because we understand their needs better. Most of the time, we become aware of new requirements through the customer support process.  While ISC is an open source company, and we fix all the serious bugs that are reported to us as soon as possible, we do prioritize the reasonable feature requests of subscribers who are supporting us, because we recognize, as all BIND users should, that the subscribers are supporting the on-going maintenance and development of BIND for everyone.

Subscriber Branch Software

We do have a special software branch that we only provide to subscribers. This gives us the ability to innovate and develop leading-edge functionality, working closely with ISPs and private enterprises that support us.  Features in this private branch reflect the evolving subscriber requirements, and sometimes they may change, or even be removed, before we eventually get to the point of releasing them in an open source release.  This private branch is a compromise with our open source objective that has enabled us to meet the needs of the subscribers who support us the most, and it is provided to subscribers at a premium level.