Unleashing the Power of Managed DNS

A Comprehensive Guide to Enhanced Domain Management

Introduction:

In the digital era, where online presence is paramount, the Domain Name System (DNS) serves as the backbone, translating user-friendly domain names into IP addresses, the numbers computers and routers use to connect to each other. Managed DNS has emerged as a game-changer, offering businesses an efficient and reliable solution for domain management at scale. This comprehensive guide explores the compelling reasons why organizations of all sizes are opting for Managed DNS to streamline their online operations.

1. Reliability and High Availability:

• Advantage: Managed DNS providers typically operate on globally distributed networks, ensuring high availability for domain resolution and fast response times from anywhere. This translates to a consistent and reliable online presence, critical for businesses that cannot afford downtime or slow content loads.

2. Performance Optimization with Anycast:

• Advantage: Anycast technology employed by Managed DNS services routes DNS queries to the nearest available server. This reduces latency, optimizes performance, and enhances the overall responsiveness of websites and online services as well as dilutes DDoS attack traffic.

3. Scalability to Support Growth:

• Advantage: As businesses expand, so does the demand on DNS infrastructure. Managed DNS services are designed to scale seamlessly, accommodating the growing volume of DNS queries and ensuring that performance remains unhindered during periods of increased traffic. Most Managed DNS services also provide comprehensive API’s into their DNS and domain name platform which is critical for customers with tens of thousands of domain names or more.

4. Advanced Security Measures:

• Advantage: Managed DNS providers invest in robust security features, including DDoS protection and DNSSEC implementation. These measures fortify the DNS infrastructure against cyber threats, safeguarding the integrity and availability of domain names.

5. User-Friendly Management Interfaces:

• Advantage: Managed DNS services often come with intuitive interfaces, simplifying the configuration of DNS settings. This user-friendly approach allows individuals with varying levels of technical expertise to manage DNS records efficiently.

6. Automatic DNS Updates:

• Advantage: Automatic updates for DNS records are a hallmark of Managed DNS. This feature ensures that changes, such as IP address updates or new record additions, are propagated swiftly and accurately across the DNS infrastructure, reducing the risk of errors.

7. Redundancy and Failover Mechanisms:

• Advantage: Managed DNS providers implement redundancy in their infrastructure. In case of server failure or issues, traffic is automatically redirected to alternative servers, ensuring seamless continuity of service and minimizing downtime. This is an automatic feature when an Anycast DNS network is properly implemented.

8. Global Content Delivery for International Reach:

• Advantage: Managed DNS services with a global server network facilitate efficient content delivery worldwide. This is especially beneficial for organizations with an international audience, contributing to faster page loading times and an enhanced user experience. Custom Geographical DNS responses can also be implemented for international audiences, responding with localized content to their given region or country.

9. Dedicated Technical Support:

• Advantage: Managed DNS services typically include dedicated technical support. This valuable resource assists organizations in troubleshooting, optimizing DNS configurations, and maintaining the smooth operation of online services.

10. Focus on Core Competencies:

• Advantage: Outsourcing DNS management to a specialized provider allows organizations to focus on their core competencies. This is particularly beneficial for smaller teams or businesses without dedicated IT resources, leveraging the expertise of Managed DNS providers.

Conclusion:

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, Managed DNS emerges as a strategic choice for organizations seeking to optimize their online presence. The amalgamation of reliability, performance optimization, security features, and scalability positions Managed DNS as a comprehensive solution for efficient and hassle-free domain management. Whether for small businesses or large enterprises, embracing Managed DNS unleashes the power to enhance online reliability, security, and focus on core business objectives. As technology advances, leveraging Managed DNS becomes a pivotal step in ensuring a robust and future-ready online infrastructure.

Secondary DNS (Domain Name System) is important for several reasons, primarily related to ensuring the reliability, availability, and resilience of your domain name services. Here are some key reasons why implementing Secondary DNS is so crucial.

Redundancy and High Availability

Secondary DNS provides redundancy by having a backup DNS network to a primary DNS configuration. In the event that the primary DNS network becomes unavailable due to hardware failure, network issues, or other reasons, the secondary DNS network can take over, ensuring that your domain names remain accessible and online. This redundancy helps minimize downtime and ensures high availability for your online presence and services.

Load Distribution

Secondary DNS can also help distribute the query load evenly across multiple DNS platforms which reside on different networks, AS’s (autonomous system) and geographical regions. This is especially important for high-traffic websites or services that need to be online and available 24x7x365 with significant uptime (99.99%+). By spreading the DNS queries across multiple servers clusters, you can prevent overloading a single network or region, which can help prevent slow response times or potential service outages.

Geographic Redundancy

If you have a global audience, using a secondary DNS network in different geographic locations can help improve the performance and reliability of your domain name resolution globally. Users from various regions and countries will be directed to the nearest and most responsive DNS server, reducing latency and providing the best user experience.

Protection Against DDoS Attacks

Secondary DNS can provide extra protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With multiple DNS servers in different locations on different networks, it becomes more challenging for attackers to overwhelm your DNS infrastructure. It adds a layer of defense by distributing the attack traffic across multiple networks.

Maintenance and Updates

A Secondary DNS network can be used to aid maintenance or updates on the primary DNS network without causing disruptions. During maintenance, you can temporarily switch to the Secondary DNS platform to continue serving DNS requests while work is performed on the primary server network.

DNS Zone Transfer

Secondary DNS servers regularly synchronize with the primary DNS server through a process called zone transfer and it’s triggered from a change to the SOA (Start of Authority) serial number on the Primary DNS Network. This ensures that they always have up-to-date DNS records, including changes to IP addresses, new or deleted records, and other DNS configuration information. This synchronization ensures accurate and consistent DNS information across all connected DNS Servers.

Business Continuity

Secondary DNS is essential for business continuity. If your primary DNS provider experiences an outage or if there are issues with your primary DNS infrastructure, having secondary DNS ensures that your online services can continue to function, minimizing the impact on your business operations and customer experience.

Fault Tolerance

Secondary DNS adds another layer of fault tolerance to your DNS infrastructure. It provides a failover mechanism that can automatically take over DNS resolution if the primary DNS network encounters problems, enhancing the overall reliability of your DNS services and your online presence.

In summary, Secondary DNS is a critical component of a robust and reliable DNS infrastructure. It helps ensure high availability, load distribution, geographic redundancy, protection against DDoS attacks, and business continuity for your online services. Implementing secondary DNS is a best practice for organizations that rely on the internet for their operations and want to provide a seamless and reliable experience to their users.

To learn more please visit our page describing our Secondary DNS Service.

What is DNS Failover and does it really work?

DNS Failover is cloud-based authoritative DNS & monitoring service that moves DNS records to a backup IP or CNAME when an outage occurs. Simply put, Failover utilizing DNS is a low cost, rapid deployment DNS & monitoring service that provides more uptime for any digital business

Failover services have been around a long time and they work well. It’s been a popular internet service offering for managed DNS providers since first debuted by TZO (Tzolkin corp) back in 2001 with the AutoFailover DNS service.

The components of a Failover solution

Failover is powered by two main components, global network monitoring coupled with a managed DNS platform. Failing over DNS simply can’t be accomplished properly without monitoring from multiple remote locations. The monitoring node’s must gather data to make intelligent decisions based on the protocol and responses from the host or IP being monitored. The failover of DNS happens when more than one node detects an outage or unresponsive host or IP address. This outage triggers the failover rules, automatically changing the hosts selected in the DNS zonefile to the CNAME or IP of the backup. The diagram shown below shows how this is accomplished with a single web server.

Failover services require a fast, reliable DNS with a very low TTL (typically 30 seconds) or DNS cache time. A low TTL allows recursive DNS servers around the globe to ensure a fresh lookup on the DNS record every 30 seconds.

When monitoring endpoints detect a “down” host and if more than two are down, the ruleset for that failover test is activated. In this HTTP web server example, DNS record for www.example.com is moved to the backup IP set in the rules.

How DNS Failover is setup – step by step:

1. Determine what needs to be monitored – ie. What pain point is being solved? ISP down, or a server going down? This determines what to monitor and what protocol to use. In all cases, Monitor at the most granular level – for a WWW server, use HTTP/S as the monitoring protocol
2. What DNS records do you want to failover? Moving a Web server? Failover the www subdomain and possibly the root domain, depending on your DNS setup
3. Move DNS to CloudFloorDNS Anycast DNS platform – Anycast DNS network is fast, reliable and provides a low TTL option for DNS failover. A low TTL allows DNS records to be more nimble – other DNS servers will not to cache these records for more than 30 seconds
4. Monitor the server, ISP or device from at least three or more locations globally.
5. Set Notification up to send emails to your team on a failure – send SMS or email notifications
6. Setup Failover rules to move DNS on failure – The failover ruleset edits the DNS hostnames and backup CNAME or IP. Failover just one hostname or multiple hostnames/backup IP’s
7. Determine the failover method – Failover and failback when the primary comes up, or Failover-StayOver where it will failover but manually failback

Can Failover help your online business add uptime?

Yes! Failover service is low cost at around $50/month and will immediately help protect against downtime from ISP outages, server failures, and power outages

ISP Failover – Failover for Two Internet Connections

ISP Failover changes the DNS for on-prem hosted servers and apps when the primary ISP goes down. Most businesses host some type of on-premise servers such as VPN, databases, remote desktop, etc. An ISP outage will take these on-prem servers offline and can cause massive disruption in day-to-day operations

Adding another ISP connection with an advanced firewall router will solve these issues, but these routers won’t move the authoritative DNS. Business routers/firewalls such as Sonicwall, Forinet, Juniper, Sophos, Barracuda, Checkpoint, Cisco will automatically failover the routing/hardware side of things, but DO NOT control or failover the authoritative DNS.

How does ISP failover work?

When the primary ISP goes down, the failover service detects, notifies and activates the failover ruleset to move selected subdomains to the backup ISP. The service can move one DNS record, or multiple records during an outage with no difference in price. Move VPN, WWW, FTP, OWA for example – all with one failover test!

Failover with GEO Load Balancing (GSLB Failover)

Almost all global organizations have multiple office locations with VPN’s for network access. For example: Example corp has US, EU & APAC offices with VPN concentrator’s. Corp IT provides employees a single domain VPN.EXAMPLE.COM for VPN connectivity. Using GSLB services will geo load balance & failover VPN when any one or more of the node’s go down. Utilizing GEO DNS, the DNS response will send any user to the closest VPN concentrator. Connecting to the closest endpoint immediately lowers latency, increasing speed for faster network connectivity. When one of the VPN nodes go down, failover will remove the node from the DNS load balancing group and add back in when it comes up again.

Monitoring & Failing over DNS adds server uptime – at a low cost

Adding failover services provides a simple, low cost reliable way to keep online apps & servers available. Failover can be an easily deployed, low cost choice when it comes to disaster recovery on a budget. Since deployment is done via authoritative DNS, it can be activated in a very short time when compared to a hardware solution. Learn more about our CloudFloorDNS Failover solutions or contact us to get a quote