One DNS Provider Goes Down

A low-cost, non-SLA DNS Provider went down last night…

This is the distinction between paying to be on as big a network as you can afford, with full-redundancy distributed over many countries and continents VS a typical hosting provider or someone else who purports to manage DNS, but can’t or won’t guarantee uptime (or even if they were to do so, there would be little at stake as far as actual refunded fees go). Most likely, what you ultimately want, though, is 100% DNS uptime. Period. If you can’t afford it, you can get some protection and even some “guarantees” out there. Practially speaking, the more skin a DNS provider has in the game, meaning, the most invested in its infrastructure, the most actual nameservers physically located behind the firewalls of as many large ISP’s as possible, the faster the average global response times, the greater ability to dilute DDoS attacks, and the more you should expect to pay. Conversely, the more you pay, the more you should expect. Simple, no?

Here is an excerpt from their blog:

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Monday, July 14. 2008

“(Provider Name Withheld) main site outage“

Greetings,

At approximately 6:00pm on Sunday July 13th, the hosting provider for a large part of our infrastructure experienced a partial power failure, causing a lot of our backend switching and routing infrastructure to malfunction.

During this outage, the (Provider Name Withheld) members site would have been inaccessible, as well as mail forwarding and web forwarding services. The bulk of the outage lasted 20 minutes, with after-effects against some services lasting some hours after that.

The web forwarding service outage lasted longer than anticipated due to an internal disagreement between several devices on who was directing the traffic. Intermittent service would have lasted between the beginning of the outage to about 11:00pm. As of this writing the service has been fully restored and the devices agree with each other again.

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Not all parts of their service went down, but domain forwarding is certainly an important aspect to many customers.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, if your DNS is mission-critical, consider investing in it. Then logically, consider what it’s worth to you to be up and running at optimum effeciency, and consider how much to invest in it as you grow.

A typical hosting provider offers 2 name-servers connected by one ethernet cable VS

Mid range managed DNS provider 32 name-servers (over ? connections) VS

Premium -  *Hundreds* of name-servers in 14 node locations in bomb-resistant structures each with Quad GigE connections — 4 ISP backbone providers in each.

As the saying goes, “no one was ever fired by going with the best available solution for mission-critical business functions” … whereas if a lesser provider fails you, who gets the blame?