This week marks the peak week for hurricane season, for those of us here on the US East coast. Whether you live here or not, you need to make sure you have a backup plan for your network. Our engineers have developed a variety of services to help combat the latencies associated with these disasters and ensure 100% availability of your domains even during a hurricane.
Hurricanes have historically wreaked havoc on Internet Service Providers (ISP) and power companies, knocking millions offline for days at a time. Most recently, superstorm Sandy caused the national daily number of network outages to double when it pummeled the East Coast in 2012.
On a typical day “0.3 percent of the Internet is down for one reason or another” (Source).
Sandy only caused outages in a few counties surrounding the Jersey Shore and Manhattan (home to a mere 20 million people combined), but it was enough to double the national daily average.
But what most people don’t realize is not only are clients directly in the path of these disasters unable to reach the Internet, but users in the surrounding areas will incur severe latency. In order to overcome this, you need to have a robust preparedness strategy in place.
The good news is there are preventative steps all businesses can take to keep their websites online and performing optimally, even during these disasters. Thanks to the cloud, these solutions are now extremely affordable for businesses of all sizes. Even if you are a small business, you can take advantage of a cloud-based DNS provider, and enjoy the uptime and performance benefits of an enterprise organization.
Prepare for the Worst
First and foremost, DNS should be your go-to when you are developing your disaster preparedness plan. DNS lies at a critical point that allows you to control who can access your domains based on their location or other characteristics. You can use these tools to develop optimal routing configurations for clients in affected areas.
For example, you can set up Global Traffic Director for your domains in US East and redirect them to servers in US West or Europe. If there are too many clients on your backup servers, you can balance the load using Round Robin to even out the traffic flow.
If you’re not ready to change your provider, or prefer to host your DNS in-house then you can still take advantage of our network. Secondary DNS services allow you to use our network as a backup for your own in case your primary DNS provider fails.
Stand Strong During a Data Center Outage
Another benefit of using a cloud-based network is the unparalleled resiliency and redundancy. DNS Made Easy operates on an IP Anycast + network that spans 16 points of presence on 5 continents. Our proprietary Anycast + technology is so strong that our network can face an entire data center outage, and still operate with no appreciable effects to end-users.
Don’t let the weather bring you down! Develop your own disaster preparedness plan and never lose uptime again.
