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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.