In today’s current climate, nearly every website has become “mission-critical” in the eyes of end users. As expectations continue to rise exponentially, so does the pressure for businesses that provide online services. While some organizations may consider outages as part of doing business in the cloud, the voice of consumers is clear. It is not acceptable.

And consumers are right. 

The average user does not understand the complexities of DNS and cloud computing—and they shouldn’t have to. But organizations do, or at least they should. However, the widespread Dyn outage that took down a large number of major sites just hours ago shows redundancy still isn’t taken as seriously as it should be.  

The Importance of DNS Redundancy for Online Businesses

According to Alexa, out of the 75K top ranking domains, 346 of them are managed by Dyn and experienced a complete outage yesterday due to their lack of DNS redundancy. While 346 out of 75K doesn’t sound like a lot, it is when you consider the amount of people that frequent the sites affected. Large websites such as Indeed, Chewy, Carvana, Fandom, Houzz, Sephora, and Credit Karma to name a few, took a considerable hit from this latest debacle.

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This isn’t the first time an outage like this happened from Dyn/Oracle or other large-scale providers, such as Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure, DNSimple, and AWS. Yet many businesses put their domains into the hands of one provider with no thought to redundancy.

With the load balancing and redundancy options available, there is really no excuse for any business to suffer a DNS-related outage. It can 100% be avoided.

The High Cost of DNS-related Outages for Brands

Just one hour of downtime can cost a business as much as $540,000 or more, depending on the size of the organization. But the scope of loss is greater than just what happens during an outage. Staff costs and loss of productivity are other considerations to factor in. Not only do IT departments have to work to fix any outage-related issues during and after an event, but productivity also falls company-wide when employees aren’t able to access systems or online platforms they need to do their jobs. In fact, it takes approximately 23 minutes for the average employee to completely refocus after a major distraction.

But the costs of an outage don’t stop there.

Brand reputation also takes a crucial hit from outages. As mentioned above, consumer expectations are growing. They all but demand a fast, and seamless online experience. In other words, just one outage can continue to cost organizations millions of dollars due to lost customers.

Infrastructure and Redundancy are the Keys to Success for Online Websites and Applications 

Another point of consideration is network capacity and infrastructure. Many providers do not have the necessary infrastructure to support enterprise-level organizations in 2021. Having an advanced, rock-solid infrastructure has never been more important. Not only is it crucial for internal system-to-system communication, but it plays a vital role in external-facing communications as well. This is why Tiggee LLC continually invests in improving and upgrading Constellix and DNS Made Easy. Our engineers are highly skilled and have extensive backgrounds in building secure and reliable services for government agencies and other large organizations that have been applying these best practices to enterprise DNS since 2001.

At Tiggee, we already offer top speeds and a 100% uptime guarantee for domains worldwide thanks to our 3,200+ peers with a current 290 Gpbs of peering capacity, 600-plus Gbps of transit capacity, and 20 points of presence (PoPs). We also provide 4TB of DDoS protection and have developed our own proprietary DNS analytics and Real-Time Anomaly Detection (RTTAD) technology for an additional layer of security. These solutions are essential in preventing attacks and identifying configuration errors, stale data, and more, and are available nowhere else. In fact, it is because of all of this that we managed to mitigate a 500+ GPBs distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in September 2020 and experienced zero downtime.

Dyn DNS Infrastructure Comparison: The Reason Behind the Outages

In comparison, Dyn has 73 peers and only 25 Gpbs of publicly listed peering capacity (transit capacity is undisclosed). They also have a history of repeated outages, and the 1,053 sites listed in the top million of domains on Alexa that rely on them as a single DNS provider have suffered the consequences. This is why infrastructure is so pivotal. We aren’t saying you shouldn’t use Dyn, but we are saying you shouldn’t rely on them as your sole provider. Every organization should strive for redundancy at every point of failure.

Even with our extensive network, in 2021, our expansion plans include adding an additional 220 Gbps of peering capacity as well as more PoPs to ensure our platforms meet the growing demands of businesses and their customers in the future.

Whether you are completely cloud-based or have physical geographically distributed systems, a DNS provider’s network and infrastructure matter. And adding DNS redundancy solutions is key to keeping organizations online and outage-proof.

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DNS Redundancy Isn't an Option, it's a Must

This simple truth is, there is an answer to the outage crises that continues to plague online businesses and applications. DNS redundancy. Implementing load balancing techniques to your DNS strategy and having an extra layer of redundancy can ensure businesses stay online 100% of the time. Redundancy not only protects your bottom line—it also protects your brand reputation and ensures an optimum online experience for your users.

Let’s stop repeating mistakes and start learning from them. DNS-related outages can be prevented, and we have a 19-year history that proves it.