It is the year 2019 and websites are crucial to almost every business. People visit thousands of websites a year, but most people don’t think about the backend of them and what it takes to keep them fast, reliable and available. Managed DNS is the backbone to websites. Most websites have one Managed DNS provider, but what happens if that provider were to ever go down? I ordered a pizza last night and because one pizza company’s website was down, I couldn’t view their menu online. Do you know what I did? I found another pizza place. This is just one small example, but these losses can greatly affect small and large businesses that depend heavily on their online sales.

How can you diversify your Managed DNS and mitigate the risk of your website going down?

If you already have a Managed DNS provider, you can have No-IP’s infrastructure act as a backup to your primary DNS in the event that your main provider should ever go offline. No-IP Squared works this way:

• You must add No-IP’s master DNS to your domain’s primary DNS zone file. You can do this on your managed DNS provider’s website. You will need to set it to allow transfer and notify. This will ensure that your secondary DNS providers zone file is always updated with the correct configurations and that the zone files are always in sync.
• Now, you need to go to your Domain Registrar and add No-IP’snameservers to your list of current nameservers.
  • It will look something like this:
    • ns1.dnsprovider.com
    • ns2.dnsprovider.com
    • ns3.dnsprovider.com
    • ns4.dnsprovider.com
    • ns2.no-ip.com
    • ns3.no-ip.com

• Now, we will resolve your domain in addition to your primary DNS provider.
• If your primary DNS provider ever goes down, your website might take longer to load, but it will still resolve and be accessible

You can also do the opposite, you can use No-IP as your primary managed DNS provider and set another provider as the failover.

Allocating a secondary DNS provider is an easy way to avoid unnecessary downtime. Remember, there are no upsides to downtime. Make sure your website is running on a rock solid foundation by not only choosing a fully redundant DNS provider but also by ensuring that your DNS is diversified.

Interested in a solution? Give our Product Specialist team a call now (775-853-1883) or drop them an email to learn about our custom solutions for backup DNS.

Has your business ever been affected by a DNS outage? What happened, how long did it take to be resolved and how much money did it cost you?