DNS Made Easy offers best practices on how to handle a DNS outage. Our experts know it can happen to anyone, anywhere and anytime. DNS goes down and web sites are offline. Outages can last minutes or days, but either way, it’s never something people like to talk about.
DNS Made Easy experts worked with companies who migrated to our services due to multiple DNS outages. These companies are helping bring the skeletons out of the closet and disclosing what would help customers in times of DNS outages.
“The best policy is to face the issues head-on,” said Steven Job, president of DNS Made Easy. “A direct approach is best.”
In recent DNS outages, large, well-known companies were down due to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks are geared at taking down websites, causing internet traffic jams and stealing information.
DNS Made Easy experts offer their tips on handing a DNS outage:
Be honest.
Don’t try to pretend nothing is happening or nothing went wrong. Be brief but to the point. Say what happened and if you know why it happened. If your site it still down, tell people it is down and when you think it will be back up.
Don’t be reactive.
Have a plan in place before anything goes wrong. Know what you will say, how you will say it and what avenues you will use to distribute information. Don’t be defensive or cast blame to make yourself look better.
Tell users you have a plan.
Let customers know you are taking corrective steps to ensure outages don’t happen again. Our clients moved to DNS Made Easy after experiencing multiple outages, and haven’t experienced an outage since.
Use social media to your advantage.
Reach your users and audience immediately via social media. Use commonly known sites such as Facebook and Twitter to send out an urgent message. Be careful not to cover up honest and helpful feedback, even if it is negative. Also, learn from your audience and remain open and truthful.
Own it and move on.
There’s no need to rehash details of who did what and why things happen. We don’t live in a perfect world, and most people understand that. Let people know what happened, that the problem is resolved and move on with servicing customers.
Outsource your managed DNS.
In order to properly defend against attacks, be on the offensive and maintain uptime, outsourcing DNS is the best bet. All of DNS Made Easy systems are located at premium data facilities with multiple data providers. From a network standpoint DNS Made Easy is in the top tier of DNS providers worldwide. We have a historical 8-year 100% uptime and an overall 99.9999% uptime history due to our 5th generation network, and continue to make significant improvements to redundancy and capacity to make sure we keep it that way. DNS Made Easy constantly researches, upgrades, and redesigns their network to exceed industry standards and insure it can defend against modern security threats. With 100% of network management being handled in-house, DNS Made Easy ensures you receive the highest quality of service possible.
Upgrade your protection.
DNS Made Easy thwarts attacks with an IP Anycast+ system, which is a network infrastructure, made up multiple geographically distributed points of presence around the world. This routing provides global load balancing, redundancy, decreased latency, and a true distributed response to denial of service (DoS) and DDoS attacks. A network of this nature is fully redundant allowing traffic to travel the most efficient path to the destination. This creates a multi-level backup system.
