Backing up GoDaddy Premium DNS with Secondary DNS

Secondary DNS is a great way to avoid costly DNS outages and many organizations are moving toward a dual DNS infrastructure. GoDaddy has had their share of DNS outages in the past and no matter who your DNS provider is, it’s a good idea to setup a secondary DNS to help avoid outages

Setting up Secondary DNS is quick and takes less than 10 minutes. This article will highlight the basics on adding Secondary DNS and setting up the DNS to have both GoDaddy and CloudFloorDNS answering DNS requests.

Before you begin, you need a few things. You’ll need GoDaddy Premium services on each domain you want to backup DNS, and you’ll also need A CloudFloorDNS account and an Anycast DNS plan from CloudFloor

Enable Secondary DNS at GoDaddy

In order to enable Secondary DNS on a domain name at GoDaddy, you MUST be using the default GoDaddy name servers with your domain. If you are using EXTERNAL name servers (also known as custom name servers) you must RESET them back to GoDaddy name servers (Default option) for Secondary DNS to become an option on the selected domain name.

To enable Secondary DNS, Login to GoDaddy, and then on your product list next to Domains, click the Text Icon (Plus sign button) to expand the domain list

Click on the MANAGE DNS on the domain name you want to setup Secondary DNS on as shown below

Scroll down and select Secondary DNS. If you don’t see this you may not have enabled Premium DNS enabled.

You’ll then see an option to turn on Secondary DNS. Click ON as shown below

Once Secondary DNS is enabled, you’ll see the Master and Slave option. Select MASTER since we want GoDaddy as the master or primary DNS, and CloudfloorDNS will be the secondary or slave servers. You’ll then see the IP Address option and ADD in the bottom right. Click ADD and go to the next step

You’ll be presented with the screen below. We need to add in 2 IP Addresses here. This allows the CloudfloorDNS Secondary DNS servers to perform zone transfers from GoDaddy. You’ll then see the screen below. We want to enter in the IP’s of these four servers below. The Start and End IP address should be the same. Enter in each IP below, TSIG should be set to NONE and select UPDATE after each IP. The IP’s are: 52.29.5.212 , 109.73.72.164

Once you’ve added in all the IP’s you’ll see them listed similar to the screenshot shown below

That’s it on the GoDaddy side for now, we’ll come back to GoDaddy in the last few steps to add CloudfloorDNS to the delegation. Now we need to login to our CloudfloorDNS account at https://Panel.CloudfloorDNS.com

Add Secondary DNS on your CloudfloorDNS account

Login to CloudfloorDNS and select MANAGE DNS, SETUP DNS, SECONDARY DNS as shown in the screenshot below:

You now add your Domain name(s) that you’ll be using to setup Secondary DNS. Add them to the list as shown below. Enter domains one per line, or a single domain. You also need to enter the IP Address from GoDaddy where you’ll be pulling zone information from. GoDaddy has two servers for AXFR transfers, they are:
domaincontrol.com (72.167.238.111) & xfr04.domaincontrol.com (72.167.238.110)

To be sure you have the latest AXFR server IP’s from GoDaddy, see this article:
https://www.godaddy.com/help/enable-secondary-dns-with-godaddy-nameservers-as-masters-23910

Enter in either one of the IP’s where it asks for PRIMARY DNS SERVER as shown below. We used 72.167.238.111 and then clicked continue.

You’ve now added the secondary zone and it’s ready to be replicated. Replication will take place immediately and every time you make a change at GoDaddy, it will send a NOTIFY and the Secondary DNS will be updated.

The last step in the process is to add CloudfloorDNS Anycast Name Servers into your public delegation for your domain. Login to GoDaddy, and then on your product list next to Domains, click the Text Icon (Plus sign button) to expand the domain list

Click on the MANAGE DNS on the domain name you setup for Secondary DNS earlier as shown below

You’ll now see the DNS records for the domain name similar to the screenshot shown below. We want to Add some Name Server records so the secondary DNS starts working at CloudfloorDNS

Click the Add button in the lower right corner and we want to add in each of the following name servers. This means we will have to do this four times. Please note your name servers may be different since CloudfloorDNS uses DNS pools for optimum performance

ns1.g02.cfdns.net
ns2.g02.cfdns.biz
ns3.g02.cfdns.info
ns4.g02.cfdns.co.uk

Enter in each server listed above as shown in the screenshot below. Set the Type to NAMSERVER, host should be the @ symbol, and enter the name server name and click the SAVE button. Do this once for each nameserver.

You should now see the name servers you added look similar to the screenshot below. Keep in mind your name server assignments may be different from the example below. Double check your entries and make any necessary changes. You should login to CloudfloorDNS once more and perform a manual zone update as described in earlier steps. This will ensure the data is replicated across properly.

That’s it! You can now edit/update DNS at your Primary as you always have done and CloudFloorDNS will Synch automatically

CloudFloorDNS will now participate in the DNS answering process along with GoDaddy. Should there ever be an issue with GoDaddy and a DNS outage occurs, CloudFloorDNS will continue to answer. If your DNS provider offers DNS stats, you will see DNS queries drop at your Primary DNS provider and CloudfloorDNS will start to balance out the DNS Queries, taking approximately half of the DNS responses. You can check your stats and replication status under the Domain Management panel at any time.

Looking to Improve your Web Performance? Start with DNS

Start with DNS to improve your web performance

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 – 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 DNS Load Balancing, GEO DNS and DNS Failover. Anycast DNS will speed 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.

Another Hurricane is on the way, what does that mean to your online business?

Evacuations are already underway in Southern Florida for incoming hurricane Michael and homes and businesses are fortifying their defenses to help protect them from the wrath of this storm. Many online businesses may not realize one of their data centers is in the path of the hurricane and can lose one of their valuable (and possibly primary) hosting locations. For most online organizations, losing a datacenter can wreak havoc with online operations causing email, websites, apps, vpn, phone system and more going belly up. That’s why it’s important to have a plan for disaster prevention/recovery with services that can keep things running smoothly.

Downtime and loss of service from an outage will put a massive dent in your books and can cost many thousands of dollars per minute depending on the size of the business. Avoiding these outages are impossible when it comes to natural disasters, so most business take action to migrate and balance to multiple data centers, avoid a single point of failure. Some of these techniques rely on good ol’ DNS – mainly load balancing and server monitoring/failover based on data center or server health. It’s also a plus that these DNS services are cloud-based and relatively low cost compared to an outage. DNS load balancing provides a simple and effective way of distributing load across multiple servers and data centers, reducing a total outage should one go down. Performance may be degraded, but you’ll still be online!

Adding on DNS failover with endpoint monitoring and now you have an automated platform that can detect server or data center health and automatically failover to a backup. Detecting health involves monitoring a server IP or data center gateway IP and if multiple locations report downtime, the failover is activated. Failover can also be activated on latency, so as a location becomes degraded, you can detect this and activate a failover scenario and removing the degraded host from the load balancing group. A simple, low cost and effective method to add performance and uptime in almost no time. It’s all done with the magic of DNS and best of all it can be deployed quickly and without hardware!

CNAME Failover – instant Disaster prevention using Server Monitoring & DNS

CNAME Failover let’s you utilize the benefits of DNS Failover without having to move your DNS to a new managed DNS provider. This let’s you get DNS failover and use it with any DNS provider such as GoDaddy, Verisign, Network Solutions, Ghandi, 1&1 and others. Setup is a breeze and all you need to do is simply change one A-Record in your current DNS and CNAME that to a domain name CloudFloorDNS provides for you. That’s it!

CNAME Failover can be setup quickly and easily and best of all it’s low cost. Once you have your CNAME selected (yournamehere.cfdnsfo.com) you can then setup the monitoring component that tests your server or web application. In most cases it’s a web server, but you can also use CNAME failover with other services and domains if your primary ISP goes down. A good example would be Failing over several hostnames when your primary ISP goes down. We setup a Netmon monitoring agent to test your primary ISP gateway or firewall to determine it’s up. Once we determine the Primary ISP has failed and is no longer responding, we update your CNAME to the backup IP you provide in the Failover. Our low TTL times allow the DNS record to propagate quickly and since your name is CNAMED to ours, you don’t have to change a thing at your current DNS provider

In order to use Failover you must use a monitoring component. Our Patented DNS and Failover platform offers you a way to set up a monitoring test and also provides you with the ability to test the service/server/app every minute from up to seven global locations. False positives (False Alarms) are a thing of the past, we require 3 or more test locations to fail before we kickoff the failover DNS change to the backup. We then notify you that we’ve detected a failure while we are changing the DNS. If you’d like you can enable Fail-Back we can even switch the DNS back to the primary when it comes back up.

Want to learn more about our CNAME Failover service? Watch a video on how CNAME Failover works or reach out and contact one of our DNS Experts for demo and proof of concept.

The importance of enabling SSL Security (HTTPS) on all of your websites

Google is constantly focused on internet security and in recent months have been enforcing more security in their popular Google Chrome browser. The Chrome browser is pushing security (HTTPS) and is now warning users in the browser just to the left of the website as shown in figure 1-1 below. This means all users of Google Chrome browser (the world’s most popular browser) now see this secure or non-secure badge for every website they visit that is not using HTTPS. Starting in July 2018 this warning will be large as shown in figure 1-2 and can’t be missed. This large warning can possibly scare people away from your website if it’s not protected with HTTPS!

SSL/TLS are encryption mechanisms that help protect the data from your browser to the server across the internet. This keeps any passwords, credit cards and other sensitive data away from prying eyes. In the old days this technology was mainly assigned to any form where credit cards were taken, but now with prying eyes everywhere, google suggests all websites turn on security by installing secure certificates. Once installed, browsers will no longer show the warning and show the green lock and “secure” as shown in figure 1-3

Why would you want to secure your website or web-based application?

There are several factors that would make you want to do this but first and foremost is security for your site and your users and it also helps your visitors to know you care about their security as well. There are other benefits to switching to HTTPS for your website such as increased speed, enhanced SEO or Google page rank and keeping your website or app user friendly. It’s a well know fact that Google has almost 60% of the browser market share which means over half of your users may now be “warned” that your website isn’t secure if you don’t do this. This new browser warning (figure 1-2) can literally scare away new and current users and make them less likely to come back. If you don’t enable HTTPS by installing a secure certificate, you could be pushing your online business slowly out of business!

What is a secure certificate?

A secure certificate or also known as an SSL certificate is a digital file that the web developer or webmaster installs on their web server to enable security. Once installed it creates and verifies the “chain of trust” from the CA or certificate authority, server and browser. It then enables the encryption (HTTPS) so your users can then browse securely, pay for services and other activities on the server and prevents your data and user data from falling into the wrong hands.

How do I make my site secure if I run a website or host a web-based app?

Easy, you can purchase and install a secure certificate for your domain on your web server or web-based application server. You can purchase SSL Certificates here or typically at your registrar or web host. There are many different levels of secure certificates, encryption and validation and it’s best to review what’s best for your business and your customers before you purchase a secure certificate. Overall pushing your websites and web-based applications will be a smarter move for your online business and will help protect both your business and your customers well into the future!

DNS SRV Resource Records – the close cousin of MX Records

MX Records are one of those critical DNS records that are required for any domain that’s using email. They are a different type of record than all the others in that they have built in redundancy into the record set itself. This built in redundancy comes in from having two or more MX records required (primary and backup server at the least) and priorities set on these records

MX records for email servers would look like:

Host                                          Priority
primarymail.example.com             10
backupmail.example.com              20

MX records are designed this way to ensure mail will be reliable and that there is always a backup server. If an email is sent and the first server isn’t responding, the second server at priority 20 get’s called into duty and the email is delivered. SRV records are another type of DNS resource record that also offers built in redundancy in the form of multiple records with both weight and priority and port. Here’s the excerpt from the RFC written by Paul Vixie back in Feb 2000:

“The SRV RR allows administrators to use several servers for a single domain, to move services from host to host with little fuss, and to designate some hosts as primary servers for a service and others as backups. Clients ask for a specific service/protocol for a specific domain (the word domain is used here in the strict RFC 1034 sense), and get back the names of any available servers.”

SRV records have been around for a while, but since the recent surge of VOIP, UC & UCaaS providers (Unified Communications) and many collaboration clients utilize SRV records for their services. When an organization set’s up a Unified Communications platform such as the Cisco Spark, they setup Cisco Expressways, Cisco Call Managers that offer these services. Clients then request these DNS SRV Resource records when attempting to connect.

For example, when using Cisco UC and firing up the Jabber collaboration client, the client first requests the _collab_edge DNS SRV record set to see available servers.

DNS SRV records for Cisco UC Collaboration (Jabber) records would look like this:

DNS SRV Name   Priority  Weight  Port  Target or (Host)
_collab-edge._tls      1 3 8443 na-jabber.example.com.
_collab-edge._tls      2 2 8443 eu-jabber.example.com.
_collab-edge._tls      3 1 8443 ap-jabber.example.com.

When a user in the North American office of Example corp and fires up their Jabber client the DNS will respond with the above records. This tells the Jabber client to connect to the lowest priority server, in this case we can see that na-jabber.example.com is the lowest priority. If that server isn’t available, the client will step up to the next priority server, in this case the eu-jabber.example.com server.

Just like MX records, you can see that SRV has built in redundancy into the resource record and it goes a few steps further by allowing weight and priority and the service port. Pretty cool huh? Just one of the neat ways you can use DNS SRV….but wait it gets better.

DNS SRV records are great but as companies grow and scale they add more servers and more SRV records. When an employee goes on the road and depending on where they are, the setup of the SRV and VPN or No VPN there are issues with the way the SRV records are handed back. Take the example above, as an employee in the North American Chicago office, It’s no problem since they are always connecting to the na-jabber server. As soon as the employee travels to Japan for a visit, their Jabber client is going to connect all the way back to North America. This can be a problem and not only take longer to connect, but it can also introduce high latency (slowdowns) that can wreak havoc on video quality, connection times and not to mention patience.

Here’s where some DNS SRV and Geographic DNS comes into play. Since we have three global locations to connect to, we can enable GEO DNS on our DNS SRV records and get even more usability out of these handy resource records.

Adding GEO DNS into these _collab-edge records now provide us the advantage to hand back the closest server to them in the region they are in. For example, now when the Chicago employee lands in Japan and connects to Jabber, the local DNS will direct him though the magic of DNS to our CloudfloorDNS Anycast DNS servers which will geo-locate John and determine that he’s using an IP address located in Japan. Our GEO Anycast DNS servers then respond back with the custom order of DNS SRV records for that region which would look like below:

DNS SRV Name   Priority  Weight  Port  Target or (Host)
_collab-edge._tls      1 3 8443 ap-jabber.example.com.
_collab-edge._tls      2 2 8443 eu-jabber.example.com.
_collab-edge._tls      3 1 8443 na-jabber.example.com.

You can see here that Geographic DNS located the user and determined they were in the APAC region and then hands back the DNS SRV records that sets the ap-jabber.example.com server with the lowest priority making it the first choice. We still provide the other SRV records as backup in the order that makes the most sense for lower latency and higher performance. Best of all it works for all DNS SRV record types such as _xmpp-server, _xmpp-client, sip, _sips, _sipfederation, and others. We hope this howto helps you utilize your DNS SRV records to better streamline your services and provide a higher quality of service.

CloudfloorDNS awarded US patent on Performance/Distance based Load Balancing

We’re pleased to show off our shiny new US Patent on performance & location based DNS Load Balancing. This is a big deal to us – it’s something that has been in the US Patent system for almost 6 years. This patent is a combination of hard work by a handful of talented people here at CloudfloorDNS and our parent company Everbridge. Why is this patent important? The patent, US# US20130297596 A1 details “systems and methods for performance based load balancing” and covers our unique combination of both performance testing (monitoring servers for latency, uptime) and our GEO DNS and DNS Failover services. This combination of global monitoring and our Anycast DNS network coupled with advanced DNS-based services offer the the best possible performance and reliability for any online business.

How our customers utilize these services:

GEO DNS – Geographically Balancing & Prioritizing Unified Communications

A growing number of clients are utilizing our GEO DNS to hand back DNS SRV records to the fastest/closest server to their end-users and/or employees. SRV records are a type of DNS resource record method to supply a list of records to the unified communications clients (VOIP, CHAT, VOICECHAT, etc) and offer port, hostname, weight and priority with redundancy built in – much like MX (Mail) Records. When an organization has a global presence, they need these servers distributed across the globe to help reduce latency and provide the best possible video/chat/VOIP call quality. Our GEO DNS hands back the DNS SRV Records for the closest regional server allowing for the ultimate in reliability and quality of service for your Unified Communications platforms such as Cisco Unified Communications (CUCM, Cisco Express) and others.

VOIP Monitoring & Failover – Providing the best possible call quality to your users

VOIP services are growing by leaps and bounds and excellent call quality and service reliability is paramount for any VOIP and UCaaS provider. They need to deliver a high availability solution with the lowest possible latency knowing that outages and poor call quality can destroy a business overnight! Our SIP Options (VOIP) monitoring and DNS Failover offer a simple and easy way to provide load balancing, monitoring and uptime to your critical VOIP infrastructure. Our global monitoring check’s your servers using the SIP Options protocol, detects latency or failure and fails over to backups instantly.

These are just a few of the many ways our expertise in performance and distance-based (GEO) DNS and related services are helping organizations provide more reliable & consistent services to their clients. If you think we may be able to help your online business, please contact a Cloudfloor DNS expert

Hurricane Phillipe came into New England with a roar this past sunday, exactly 5 years after superstorm Sandy graced us with her presence in 2013. Just two days later more than 1 million homes are still without power! Many schools and businesses are still closed while the cleanup and power restoration continues and it could be several more days until the regional grid is fully restored.

In some ways the power to your home is just like DNS is to your business. Without it, nothing works. No Lights (Website), No Water (Email), and so on. Things just don’t work and your home doesn’t feel much like home when nothing works.

The relationship to DNS and your online business is similar. DNS is just like the electricity that powers your website, your email, your VPN, VOIP, API’s and other important aspects that make your online business run. Unplanned downtime is extremely expensive since your business can no longer sell online, customers can’t checkout and pay or even see your website for that matter. Their emails to you don’t work and bounce back….in essence it’s a blackout of everything online costing you thousands of dollars in lost sales and opportunity.

Portable and Standby generators are humming along in my neighborhood and many others across the region. These trusty devices are the backup power that many rely on when the power grid fails to deliver. In the online business world, the generator is very much like Secondary DNS. When the power goes out the generator takes over and makes living in the home possible. Secondary DNS does very much the same thing but for your online business. In the event of a DNS outage at your primary provider, Secondary DNS “takes over” and keeps your business running. Best of all, you don’t have to drag the secondary DNS out of the garage and fire it up, it’s 100% automatic and your business will never miss a beat if your primary DNS goes down

Interested in adding more reliability and resiliency to your online presence? We have DNS experts to help you every step of the way and we know how scary it is to mess around with your DNS. Contact us or visit our Secondary DNS product page for more details on how we can help

Don’t let a DDoS attack Eclipse your DNS

DDoS attacks are on the rise and the experts don’t forsee any slowdown in the near future. Attackers utilize botnets, IoT devices and other compromised systems to build cyber-armies and leverage these armies against you directly or your DNS service provider. In many cases, DD0S attacks can be fatal to small online businesses that aren’t protected.

The first step to protecting your online digital business is at the infrastructure level and that means DNS. Here are a few steps you can use to protect your digital business when it comes to DNS:

1 – Don’t get caught using your “hosting or registrar” DNS 
DNS typically comes free with any domain you register or web hosting or domain registrar but there is a drawback to this. In most cases their DNS is much slower and less resilient when it comes to DD0S attacks. Since DNS is such a critical component to your online success, you should invest in DNS as a business strategy. This means going with Managed DNS and setting up a budget for fast, reliable DNS. Pick a managed DNS provider that uses an Anycast DNS network like CloudfloorDNS, NS1, UltraDNS, Dyn or others. These guys focus solely on DNS as a Service and run large Anycast DNS networks in the cloud. They also have DDoS mitigation in place to help thwart attacks and are typically much more fortified than your Web hosting or domain registrar DNS

2 – Backup your DNS with Secondary DNS
Secondary DNS is a standard method to safely backup your DNS zones onto another DNS provider/network if your primary DNS provider goes down. Secondary DNS has been around for quite some time although it’s not often implemented – even though it can save your business if you have a primary DNS outage (like the attack on Dyn back in Oct 2016). Setting up secondary DNS only takes about 10 minutes if not less and instantly copies your DNS zones to a secondary provider. The “spreads the risk” across two DNS providers and in many cases can also speed up your DNS. Best of all, Secondary DNS is low cost and will have a minor impact on your budget yet provides the best possible insurance you can ask for in DNS Infrastructure

3 – Utilize Advanced DNS services
GEO DNS, DNS Failover and DNS Load Balancing are some of the best ways to manage your DNS Traffic and add uptime to your online services. DNS Failover and DNS Load balancing are standard offerings by all managed DNS providers and are also low cost ways to extend your reliability and scalability. Monitoring your servers from multiple locations and failing over DNS to a backup when your primary fails can help extend the reliability of your customer facing servers and apps. Monitoring them for latency can also be implemented, so any servers that slow down above a certain threshold (in ms) can be taken out of the load balancing pool.

GEO DNS can also be used to increase performance and customer retention. By geo-locating your clients in their DNS requests you can determine the closest/fastest server and then send them to the version of your website or application in their local language and currency. It’s a well know fact that faster websites/apps and localized content helps convert more customers and makes your website or app more “sticky”

These are just a few of the many suggestions to help you keep the lights on when it comes to your digital business and DNS. In the age of DDoS Attacks, ransomware attacks and other digital criminal mischief it’s important that you realize the critical nature of your DNS infrastructure and make proper investments to ensure the reliability of your online operations

UPS, FedEx and the postal service are all experts at delivering packages and they need to be as efficient as possible to ensure they maintain profitability. If they are slow and inefficient at delivering the goods, they will loose sales and have dis-satisfied customers as a result.

The same goes with your online content – you need to deliver it fast and reliable or you’ll also loose customers and sales. Content accuracy also counts – If you have multiple resellers in different geographic regions you’ll also need to deliver that content accurately using the local language and currency. It’s a well known fact that localized content can give a big boost to online sales and conversions. Think about it, when was the last time you purchased from a website that wasn’t in your local language or currency?

GEO DNS is an advanced component of the Cloudfloor Enterprise Anycast DNS platform. GEO DNS resolves Authoritative DNS requests by translating names into IP addresses, but goes one level deeper with a geo-location of the end user requesting the content. Once the end-user’s location is revealed, the DNS will hand back IP’s based on certain geographic rules that you set for your domain(s). You can send the user to a server closer to them or to a version of your website that has their local reseller and pricing, all in their native language. You can even use geo location and forward users to a http/s URL for services like Shopify and others with limited DNS naming capabilities. Overall GEO DNS is a simple and effective way to fine tune your online content delivery and increases your end-user satisfaction while doing so.

Interested in our GEO DNS for your online business or possibly taking our Enterprise DNS platform for a test drive? Contact us or visit our GEO DNS product pages for more details