The Domain Name Service is a crucial aspect of maintaining a stable and reliable web presence. No matter how solid a business’s web hosting might be, how well-designed their site, and how effective their search engine optimization, without a properly managed domain name service, the connection between revenue generating users and a business’s site cannot be relied upon.
In the Unix developer world, there is a prevailing philosophy that a tool should do one thing and do it well. That’s both because it’s an extremely flexible approach, allowing collections of tools to be used in combinations that could never have been thought of by the original developer and because it allows developers to cultivate a deep knowledge of the problems of a particular domain and the best ways to solve them.
It’s a powerful way of thinking about developing software, and it’s equally applicable to other areas where a combination of functional units can be organized to contribute to an overarching goal.
One such area is enterprise website hosting. May different facets working flawlessly together are necessary for a reliable and responsive site, including web hosts, domain name registrars, bandwidth providers, and the Domain Name Service.
Often, rather than choosing the “Unix way” businesses opt for a one-size-fits-all approach, and instead of building their sites using expert service providers that have profound domain specific knowledge and specialist infrastructure, they settle on one vendor that perhaps offers excellent web hosting, but also throws in domain name registration and DNS hosting as a free addition to their service or as an up-sell.
If a business is content with “barely good enough” service, then this is a viable option. But, for maintaining excellent service over a long period of time, there is considerable advantage to building a site’s infrastructure using the best providers for each job.
One area in particular where opting for the cheap and limited services of generalist hosting companies can prove problematic is DNS.
Slow-to-load sites and downtime result in revenue losses. Minimizing those losses is the business of all responsible system administrators and site managers. Yet, quite often, the task of maintaining the essential link between clients and sites is left up to those for whom Domain Name Service management is not a core competence.
Managed DNS hosting, provided by an expert DNS hosting company, offers a degree of reliability, redundancy, and flexibility that’s often not achievable by standard web hosting companies.
While it might make sense in the short term to put all of a company’s eggs in one basket, the risk of failure from a monolithic service provider is high, their expertise is often broad rather than deep, and their business model may dictated that resources are focussed on core areas so that peripheral services like DNS are neglected.
Doing DNS properly requires more than having a couple of name servers sat in a data center responding to requests for thousands of shared hosting clients. DNS Made Easy has a dedicated IP Anycast network with each DNS server IP linking to hundred of copies, providing a level of redundancy that ensures that problems in one server or even a large chunk of the network will not affect site uptime for managed DNS hosting clients.
DNS Made Easy knows DNS. We built our own industry-leading network and have been providing managed DNS hosting to enterprises of all sizes for many years. DNS is what we do, and we take pride in making sure that our clients feel they can absolutely rely on us to provide the support they need.
