Many different services are involved in getting a site from the machines that serve it to the browsers of its users. Among them are domain name registrars, DNS hosting, web hosting, content distribution networks, and the networking infrastructure that underlies them all.
It’s common among IT professionals to advise that at least some of these services are distributed among different providers. For example, a site’s hosting provider should not be the same as the registrar that they bought their domain name from. The reasons for this are straightforward: occasionally companies fail (especially low-price domain name registrars and web hosts) and each company may have different strengths. Separating the domain name registrar from the hosting provider ensures that the risks and benefits are spread across different companies, rather than concentrated in one.
Separating out the the elements involved in site hosting allows administrators to make informed decisions about the relative strengths of the providers of each. The best web hosting company is unlikely to be the company that offers the best available DNS hosting. The most reliable domain name registrars do not always have the most robust web hosting services.
Hosting companies tend to bundle services together or use some features for upselling. When a company buys web hosting, they are almost certain to be offered both cheap domain name registration and DNS hosting as part of a package. Although taking these “deals” reduces the complexity of setting up a site, it can both put business continuity at risk and decrease the ability to make informed decisions about infrastructure and costs.
DNS hosting in particular is one of the elements that site owners should consider buying from a specialist provider. Most web hosting companies offer some form of DNS hosting, but they usually cannot offer the internationally distributed, multiply redundant IP AnyCast network that a company like DNS Made Easy provides for its customers.
A company that relies on its site for eCommerce, advertising revenue, or essential business operations cannot responsibly risk having access to that site degraded by poor DNS hosting, or worse still, suffer downtime because their web host doesn’t have the particular expertise and infrastructure that reliable DNS hosting requires.
A company wouldn’t source the development of its logistics software from the agency that created its website design just because they can both code and the web developer offered them a deal. Nor should they entrust a business critical service like domain name hosting to a company that makes most of its money from web hosting. Offering the very best in DNS hosting is not a priority for those companies.
To increase the overall resiliency and uptime of a company’s infrastructure and ensure maximum flexibility in vendor decisions, each part of the hosting process should be considered separately and its provision entrusted to the best vendors in their respective areas of expertise.
