About
Built by someone
who has done the 9pm change.
DNSMentor is built and run by Chris Howard, who also runs the MSP it was built for. It exists because of one change that went wrong — [the specific one: whose client, which record, and how long before anybody noticed].
The detail that matters is not that it broke. It is that nothing said so. The provider reported the change as saved, the control panel showed the new value, and every dashboard stayed green. DNS is the only critical system an MSP runs that fails with no error message anywhere — mail queues at the sending server, a verification record is simply never found, an SPF record silently authorises nobody. You find out when a customer rings, and by then it has been true for hours.
Everything in this product follows from that. A change is written by one person and approved by another. Every value is checked against the rules before it is sent, not after. A provider accepting a write is not treated as the change being live — the platform watches public DNS until resolvers actually return the new answer. And MX values cannot be applied without a second person confirming them by hand, at any skill level, because a wrong MX is the quietest failure of the lot.
Why build rather than buy
Because nothing on the market is shaped like an MSP. DNS tooling is built either for a single organisation managing its own domains, or for a registrar managing its own customers. Neither describes an estate of hundreds of domains spread across two dozen providers, belonging to clients who each want to see their own and nobody else’s, changed by engineers of very different experience under an audit trail that has to stand up afterwards.
The alternative was a spreadsheet, a shared login and a habit of being careful. That is what most MSPs are running today, and being careful is not a control.
Who is behind it
[Two sentences: roughly what you have done and for how long. Not a CV.] The platform is used daily against a real estate of client domains across 20i, Cloudflare, Bunny, ClouDNS and others, which is why the provider list on this site separates what has been proven against a live account from what has only been written.
draft Chris — the two bracketed gaps are yours, and this page still needs a real photograph. The rest is drafted from the product and can be rewritten freely; a version of the incident written by anybody else would be the one dishonest thing on the site.
What the product will not do
It will not scrape a provider’s control panel to fake support for an API that does not exist. It will not tell you a change is live because the provider said it saved. It will not let anyone, at any level, skip the hand-check on an MX value. Each of those was a decision with a cheaper alternative.
Where it is
Live, and in private testing with real MSPs and real client domains. Not a prototype and not a finished product — which is why the provider list on this site is divided into what has been proven and what has only been written, and why the roadmap is described in what it does rather than what it will do.
Rather talk to a person?
That is generally the fastest way to find out whether this is any use to you. No deck.
No card. No trial clock. UK-hosted, and we will tell you which providers we have actually proven before you ask.