Socrates said something like, “He who educates is himself educated.” In a past life I taught languages at the university level, and I can certainly attest to that truism – I believe I learned more from preparation for my classes and from my students themselves than they could have learned from one of my courses.
Here I am attempting to address vulnerabilities and performance gaps in a vast network of web-sites, fully 75% of the World Wide Web. The responsible parties may be unaware that they are utilizing vulnerable and inefficient methods of converting names to IP addresses – the virtual doors to their businesses. Unfortunately, once informed many remain complacent, whether because they haven’t experienced an obvious issue with DNS, or they underestimate the impact that a breech in their doorways can have on their companies and their customers. I have attempted to understand the reasons for this.
One might be lack of trust of the messengers or their tests. Sometimes proponents of open-source software are so wedded to that sometimes Utopian ideal (where black-hat hackers, blackmailers and unscrupulous competitors do not exist), that they insist that the world’s community of developers will fix any issues quickly enough, whether revenue is being lost, or not. Another might be a reluctance to pay for something that has been “free,” either simply in principle, or relative to the ROI which must be measured based on either a non-mission-critical web-site, or lack of relative monetization of their web-sites. Or if they’re using a low-cost paid solution, they have to actually consider the cost of their site being unavailable for 5 minutes, an hour, or a day, and compare the cost of paying perhaps 10 times as much for a truly secure, high-performance DNS infrastructure.
Companies who have paid to be on a more robust DNS network have taken some steps to guarantee their success – and that they must be not only aware, but also responsible and decisive. Often they must champion a move to our network, and convince those who control their companies’ purse-strings.
Rarely, smaller customers, those either without significant traffic or not yet having monetized their traffic and users, may be paying for something that they “could do without,” for the time being. In that case they have likely made the decision because their user experience and reputation are especially important to them as they are establishing their brand.
I have begun to understand why the leaders in all the major on-line vertical markets entrust their business portals and sites to the best available DNS network they can find. When each hour of downtime could mean tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, these sites do not hesitate to pay a premium for such a service as cost-effective insurance that their commerce will continue uninterrupted.
As all such solutions are defensive in nature, empowering the IT professionals who utilize them, and enhancing the experiences of users of their sites, offering a much more robust DNS solution appears a valid, and even noble enterprise. Thus options exist for those who refuse to leave the health of their infrastructure to chance. No one wants to pay more than necessary for value received. The line paraphrased here, however, rings true : “There is always someone who can make a product cheaper, and the buyer who purchases based on price alone is that maker’s lawful prey.”
