What does DNS downtime mean?
DNS downtime, also known as DNS outage, is the time during which the DNS is unavailable. You already know how important the resolution procedure is for gaining access to your domain name. The procedure of translating it to its IP address will be impossible if DNS fails. As a result, your website will be unable to be found, and its content will be unavailable.
Why is it dangerous?
If the DNS goes down, no one will be able to see your site, and any services linked with the domain name, such as email, would be unavailable. You’ll need to restart it to reclaim all of the functionality that was temporarily lost.
In the meantime, you can:
- Lose out on potential guests.
- To risk missing out on possible sales
- To have problems with your email, FTP, VoIP, or other services
How to prevent DNS downtime?
Yes, avoiding DNS downtime is possible. How? The methods listed below can be used:
- Implement Anycast DNS. Using Anycast, the query can be answered by a number of different servers located throughout the globe. The user will receive the IP address from the closest of them. In addition, if one of the DNS servers is unavailable for some reason, the request will be forwarded to the next nearest server.
- DNS Monitoring service. Every out-of-the-ordinary traffic pattern could be an indication of something significant. Invest in a good monitoring system. Some can show data in near-real time by region, country, continent, and so on, allowing you to study the problem, its cause, and respond.
- Use secondary DNS servers if necessary. Increasing the redundancy of your DNS network by adding secondary DNS servers is a good idea. More copies of your DNS records will be saved as a result of this change, and you will be able to better control your traffic. If your primary DNS server goes down, your clients’ requests will be handled by the secondary DNS servers.
- Increase the TTL (time-to-live) of your DNS records. The job of recursive servers is to look for updates on authoritative name servers. Recursive servers will look for updates less frequently if you configure a high TTL value. However, with a low TTL value, they will check for updates more regularly. A short TTL is very useful when changing or editing DNS records because it speeds up the propagation process. Keep a higher TTL if you don’t need constant changes to avoid downtime.
Conclusion
To summarize, DNS downtime is extremely dangerous and can severely harm your business. If you don’t want this to happen, use various protection tools such as Monitoring, Secondary DNS, Anycast DNS, and so on. Good luck!
Hi. My name is Travis.