Many organizations are flocking to the cloud for their websites and hosted applications for increased performance. The cloud takes the chore out of provisioning servers and adds a layer of simplicity to scale out performance as the need escalates with just a few clicks. Having a large network of fast servers at the ready helps with scalability, but it’s only part of the equation to optimum web performance.

DNS is often overlooked when it comes to your Internet operations performance, yet it’s often one of the most critical components in the chain when squeezing out every ounce of speed. Every web page and app have resources and objects that are required to load for the page or app to be usable. Some web pages and apps can have hundreds of these, each one taking a few milliseconds to load. Each of these resources are typically hosted on your servers and thus need a DNS request to process each item. Slow DNS means slowdowns when fetching these resources, and the end result is slow page and app rendering.

Mix slow anything with today’s ever-impatient consumers and you have a problem. Today’s online visitors will wait for a second or two until they leave your site in search of the products or services they are looking for. Marketing research proves it – a slow site means a loss of clients and revenue to faster, more convenient competition.

Since DNS is at the bottom of the commonly thought of technology chain when it comes to online operations, it makes sense to start there. Select a Managed DNS provider that offers a fast global Anycast DNS network along with advanced DNS services like Load Balancing, GEO DNS and Failover. Anycast DNS will speed vastly up your operations from the start, and advanced DNS services can greatly increase uptime, scalability and brand availability.

When it comes down to it, it’s all about maintaining the foundation of your Internet presence and that begins with DNS. DNS resides at the core of all online activities and without it the Internet wouldn’t exist as it does today. With a fast, consistent availability of your online presence you will continually maintain the loyalty and confidence of your current clients and satisfy future customers.

Have you checked your Web Performance lately? CloudfloorDNS can help you examine your current performance and provide solutions to instantly increase your DNS speed, reliability and flexibility.

CloudfloorDNS, An Everbridge Solution – https://www.CloudfloorDNS.com

Your Internet Operations rely on DNS – an often overlooked area when it comes to enhancing both the speed and reliability of your web presence. Whether you run your own DNS server or you outsource to a Managed DNS provider, having a backup or secondary DNS provider can save your company from costly downtime if and when something happens.

Secondary DNS service simply mirrors the zone files from your primary DNS server and responds to queries just like the primary. If the Primary DNS has an outage or is attacked, your secondary DNS provider handles the load. Having a redundant DNS provider may seem like a waste of money in your operations budget, but when you realize the true cost of downtime (lost sales, lost customers and brand damage), paying for a secondary DNS provider seems like a bargain.

Does your company have a plan for a DNS outage? If not it’s time to think about it…..and getting a secondary DNS provider

The holiday shopping season just started and online purchasing for holiday gifts & gatherings are heating up. This is a busy season for your hosting providers and cloud companies, slinging data as fast as they can to keep up with the demand. It’s the same with DNS providers, this is one of those busy seasons when online retailers ramp up their capacity by load balancing and adding more hostnames and CPU cycles to their lineup.

Some online retailers don’t realize that a customers online shopping experience all begins with DNS, and your DNS provider is a critical key to not only answering DNS, but doing it smart and fast. When a prospective customer wants to browse your online offerings, they type in your domain name. This then triggers searches on DNS from the client computer to their IP, to the Root servers, the TLD server and eventually to your DNS host (Such as CloudfloorDNS, or possibly your Web Host such as GoDaddy, Rackspace, etc)

The faster your DNS host answers, the faster that customer can load their browser up with your catalog of products and services. Imagine if you had slow DNS answering for your domain and thousands of customers trying to hit your site. Each second adds up and the average person today won’t wait more than a few seconds to see a page load. An Error comes up and they are gone and off to a competitor. Not only can sales and valuable revenue be lost, but customer loyalty and a dented brand can be part of the collateral damage.
If you area serious about protecting your brand and bottom line, it’s not too late. Here are a few things you can do to help get you a solid footing before the big rush starts in November:

• SPEED – Switch to a pure Anycast DNS solution from a trusted Managed DNS provider – If your still using your hosting company to handle DNS for you, that can be a place to start. Most Web hosting companies do DNS because they have to, and its typically less reliable, slower and missing advanced DNS features.
• RELIABILITY – Anycast DNS adds a level of reliability in itself , but it cant hurt to utilize a Failover solution as well. Using DNS Failover and having a second or third server to helps lower your chances of an outage. Having a hot standby or load balancing and using Automatic DNS Failover can detect a failed or slow server and move DNS to a backup.
• FLEXIBILITY – Load balancing and GEO DNS are other added benefits when migrating to a managed DNS provider. These advanced DNS services offer a quick and simple way to balance DNS traffic over multiple servers, or even segregate DNS traffic by country, allowing you to fine tune who gets what on a geographical scale.

DNS – The Foundation of your Internet Presence

I’ve been in the DNS and Domain name business for almost 20 years now and explaining what DNS is and how important it is has always been a struggle. As critical as DNS is, it’s an underlying Internet technology that not many people pay too much attention to – until it’s not working.

During all those years in my career I’ve struggled for a quick and simple way to explain what DNS is and it’s importance in the chain of Internet technology. This graphic above really sums up the importance of DNS and how it acts as the foundation of your online presence.

Sit back and think about your Internet presence as a house or building that contains your web server, email servers, FTP server, API, VOIP Phone system etc. This house of yours relies on two things; your domain name and DNS before any other service can be setup.

Your domain name is just like the plot of land you build on – without your parcel of land, you have nowhere to build. The domain name must be registered and in good standing (Not expired) before anything will work. Once you have your domain name, you can start to build the foundation before you can build your house. If your foundation is weak and unreliable, your house can crumble to the ground. This foundation is your DNS – a reliable way of answering queries to your domain name and pointing visitors to your online resources such as your web server, etc. Without a strong DNS service as your foundation, you risk loosing the house and all it’s contents.

There are many other analogies that can be used to explain DNS but the true moral of the story is don’t skimp on the foundation when building your Internet house…

BIND is the world’s most popular DNS server – serving a large portion of the Internet due to it’s open source model and free distribution. This DNS software is a wonderful benefit for the Internet community, but also something that requires care and affection.

Just last week, a major flaw (CVE-2015-5477) was discovered in BIND DNS Version 9.X that could allow a single lone wolf attacker (An Internet “bad guy”) to take down a large number of domain entities across the internet with an easy to execute malformed query. All it takes is a push of the button and your domain and all of your online resources could become virtually crippled.

Fortunately, CloudfloorDNS uses a proprietary DNS system that is not vulnerable to these BIND attacks/exploits.

This story isn’t about BIND per se – its about not placing your organization at risk by using DNS smarter. How so? It’s simple. There are two options. One, use an Authoritative DNS Provider that isn’t susceptible to the same risks that some open source software can present. Two, add a non open source Authoritative DNS Provider to your delegation along with your existing provider that may use open source Name Server software. Having dual Authoritative DNS providers will mitigate risk by not allowing your Internet presence to be threatened by open source vulnerabilities and it also offers additional geographic redundancy. This may sound over the top, but if your business relies on a single organization that uses open source software only, and they get hit with a vulnerability attack as described above, your company and your online business simply goes offline. Not only your website, but your entire online entity will go down in flames. It’s just as bad as allowing your domain name to expire.

When it comes to DNS, thinking smarter and not waiting until a failure or attack to make those critical infrastructure decisions can save you in the long run.

Yesterday was a great day for DNS with Cisco buying recursive DNS provider OpenDNS. I received many emails from friends and colleagues relaying the news to me and they were almost as excited as I was. They all know I have built my career around providing DNS services to companies across the globe and this news was just good for DNS in general.

In light of all this attention to DNS yesterday, I saw a common theme amongst all the emails – most everyone thinks there is just one type of DNS and lump us all into the same category. That’s not the case and here’s why:

There are two main types of DNS servers – Recursive and Authoritative. OpenDNS acts as a RECURSIVE service, allows computers all over the world to ask OpenDNS where a domain name resides (on what IP address). In order to truly understand what’s happening and why there are two main types of DNS servers, we have to go back to examine what happens when you browse to “google.com” on your laptop, tablet or smartphone or open a cloud-based app.

When you lookup a website in your browser or open an app on your smartphone, there is a ton of DNS activity that goes on to make all the magic happen. There are requests and responses for websites, images, video,etc. A Recursive server does most of the first answering, and they ask other authoritative DNS servers for the answers. Those servers respond back to your browser. (There is more that goes on but this is the simplistic version)

Recursive DNS
Example: OpenDNS / Google DNS / Your ISP’s DNS

These servers are first line responders to your web browser and Apps when they request a domain name or internet resource. If the name is not locally cached or known on the Recursive DNS server, then is will ask the Authoritative DNS server for the answer and respond back to the asking client/browser/app.

This recursive DNS server is typically housed at your ISP since it’s very close to you, and this server simply is a “fetching machine” where it fetches names from AUTHORITATIVE SERVERS to then hand back to your browser with the proper IP address. OpenDNS is a recursive DNS provider that allows you as a company or individual to use their service to help speed up your browsing and protect you from malicious names, or even add parental controls blocking any domain name with the word “sex” in it for example.

CloudfloorDNS is an authoritative DNS provider, where we take your company’s database of names and IP addresses and we answer for them with speed and reliability. We can also do some fancy things with DNS such as Failover and GEO Load Balancing, but that’s another article….

Authoritative DNS
Example: CloudfloorDNS Managed DNS

CloudfloorDNS is the authority for client hosted second level domains (example.com). If a domain name is not known on a Recursive DNS server such as OpenDNS then the OpenDNS will ask the CloudfloorDNS servers for the Authoritative answer and respond back to the client with the correct answer.

There is a very organized, hierarchical structure to the DNS system. This goes all the way from the sub-domains (yourname.example.com) to the second-level domain names (example.com) to the top level domains (.com, .biz, etc), then the root servers (The all knowing wizards of the internet) which are at the highest level in the DNS tree.

I hope this helped you understand the differences between the types of DNS servers you may come across in your internet adventures. Probably the most important thing to take away is that DNS is a critical piece of infrastructure to your organization, no matter how big or how small. Next to having your domain name actually registered, DNS is the next most important technology in the chain to completing any web transaction, download, or web page view. DNS is everywhere and unfortunately nobody thinks too much about it until it doesn’t work!