Managed DNS - What is it and how does it help
Posted by Alexander McMillen
Unfortunately, there aren’t going to be any pretty pictures in this article- but this is because we’ve already explained the basic jist about what DNS is all about through the previous post, ”OpenDNS is Awesome”. Assuming that you read that article, you should be able to keep up. If not, feel free to e-mail blog-feedback@sliqua.com or give us a call at 1-866-754-0856 and we’ll try to explain it to you. Without further delay… the post!
The last post was all about DNS and how speeding up DNS speeds up everything else. We mentioned OpenDNS, a company that offers a free service for users so that they don’t have to use their ISP’s often slow DNS servers. However, the visitors to websites aren’t the only people who use DNS servers. DNS servers also are used to hold records for a website, and answer when needed. Most web site owners use their host’s DNS servers as a part of their hosting deal, however this is less than ideal in many of the same respects as using your ISP’s DNS servers: they aren’t optimized, they are slower, and there are fewer servers to answer based on geographic location. This is why many people are looking into Managed DNS (and those that aren’t probably should). Basically, Managed DNS is a web of servers with the same information to resolve your domain to the ip address of your web server. This does three basic things that improve the quality of your DNS servers:
It adds redundancy. In many cases, the default DNS servers given to you by your host are on a single server, or maybe two servers on the same network. In the case of many smaller hosts, this could even mean your DNS is sharing a server with your website and email. If the server goes down, the network goes down, or there is some physical problem (perhaps the facility has a power outage, or fire), your DNS won’t be accessible. Without DNS, your entire domain won’t do anything, even if some servers are still up they will not be accessible because the translation from www.sliqua.com to the ip address won’t take place. Managed DNS services (good ones, at least) typically have multiple servers (5 or more per customer), each in different physical locations (dispersed across the country or around the world), and on different networks. This all means that it’s terribly unlikely that your DNS will ever totally go out, even if an absolute disaster strikes (this is, of course, barring major worldwide disasters of apocalyptic proportion; but at that point, you shouldn’t be worrying about your website anyway).
It speeds up response time. If you’re on the east cost, you have your website hosted on multiple servers across the globe, but your DNS servers are all in one place, that is going to slow down people accessing your server. If you have many different servers, all scattered at key points around the globe, then you will have universally fast response times, and the faster someone can load your site the better off you are.
Managed DNS is more resistant to hackers. I hate using the term hacker in that sense, but it gets through to people. One of the most common types of attacks against a website (or internet server in general) is to use what’s called a DDoS attack. This attempts to flood a server with bogus requests, so that it doesn’t have time (or bandwidth) to respond to legitimate requests, effectively taking the server offline. One of the common ways to do this is to flood a DNS server with requests for a domain name, so that it overpowers the server and makes it stop responding. If you have multiple servers, this makes this type of attack significantly harder to execute with success, as even if one server stops responding, the others will still be alive and kicking.
There are websites that simply do not need Managed DNS. Personal websites, project websites, etc, don’t really need to have the absolute fastest and ultra reliable DNS service that Managed DNS offers, but for businesses and e-commerce websites, it’s absolutely essential. We have all been looking around for something to buy and had the website we were trying to reach be down. I know you didn’t try particularly hard to contact that company either, just move on to someone else. Well, that company lost a sale, and they probably lost more than one sale. If you think you need Managed DNS, there are several providers. Sliqua does indeed offer a very high-caliber Managed DNS service, but there are others in all sorts of different price ranges. Many domain registrars will offer Managed DNS to their customers, as will many hosting companies. There are also standalone Managed DNS companies that specialize in Managed DNS. These tend to be more reliable, and the fastest, but also cost significantly more. Other companies worth mentioning are: DNS Made Easy, UltraDNS, and EasyDNS. Also, a quick google search for “Managed DNS” will turn up countless results. A good way to test their DNS services is to use a website that I absolutely love, called dnsstuff.com. This website has a whole bunch of tools that you can use to test DNS related things as well as general internet tools like IP lookup. The best tools to rate DNS servers is the DNS report tool and the DNS timing tool. The report will give you a detailed report about the DNS server, while the DNS timing tool will give you the time (in ms) that it took to receive a response from the DNS server. All you need to do for these tools is put in a domain name (Sliqua.com, to test the DNS servers we use) and hit go.
As a side note, thanks for all of the people who are subscribing to our blog, and we hope you’ll keep reading to learn how to make your internet experience awesome! We have an email address setup for blog feedback (in addition to comments) at blog-feedback@sliqua.com and we have a Facebook group for more personal interaction with the staff and supporters of this site. Thanks again, and I hope you’ll continue to support us.
