Let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the blog. We want your business. Yeah, I said it. But let me explain. We hate seeing any company suffer from an outage or throwing money needlessly down the drain. It doesn’t have to be like that. See, we don’t just offer DNS, DNS is in our DNA. And, we genuinely want to help make the internet a more reliable and safer place for everyone. Really.

Don’t Underestimate DNS

DNS is one of the most overlooked and underutilized tools in an organization’s arsenal. It can literally be the difference between customers choosing your products or services over a competitor’s. 

Here’s the thing

Websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load experience 40% more bounce rates—and desktop users tend to “bounce” even faster (2 seconds). Downtime can cost upward of $300,000 in as little as an hour! And in the case of DNS, all publicity isn’t good publicity. No matter how you spin it, when your website goes dark, it negatively affects your brand’s reputation. If you’re not there when your customers need you, they start looking elsewhere. 
Competition is fierce. Don’t make it even harder by accepting downtime or slow query resolution.

Did you know?: Faster DNS query resolution can not only boost your site’s performance, but can also increase SEO rankings. Page load times will become even more critical to SEO starting in May 2021, when Google updates its SERP algorithm. 

Better DNS Helps Speed and Reliability

But how, might you ask, can we (or any other DNS provider for that matter) make such a difference? I’ll tell you. When getting down to the essence of DNS, it’s about the provider’s infrastructure, its points of presence (PoPs), and the amount of data the PoPs can handle.

Not all DNS providers are created equal. [Caution: Shameless self-promotion ahead]. We have 19 PoPs and counting that can—and have—handled significant amounts of traffic, including surges from massive DDoS attacks (and all of our clients stayed online). Our infrastructure was built in-house from the ground up with the sole purpose of making the lives of IT technicians around the world easier and to make sure businesses stayed up 100% of the time.

There are several ways to achieve 100% uptime and to streamline your DNS management, all of which have value. Do yourself and your business a favor and do your research. You’ll find having a strong DNS strategy in place will pay off big in the long run.

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9 Things to Consider Before Switching DNS Providers:‍

1. What are your main DNS goals?
   It may seem obvious, but knowing what you want to achieve with DNS can make all the difference in the performance of your domain(s) in the long run. Your decisions can also greatly affect future development and innovation, so make sure you know your goals and choose a provider that can exceed them, not just meet them where you’re at now.
   
   
2. Do you have a dedicated person or team to handle your DNS configurations?
   If you’re serious about DNS, there’s more to it than just pointing your domain to a name server. If you don’t have a dedicated IT department, you have a higher chance of something going awry. Your costs can also increase substantially if you require additional support from your provider. Paying extra for support is never a bad thing, but if you don’t need a complicated DNS configuration, you could save your organization a pretty penny by choosing the right service for your domain.
   
   
3. Do you need multi-user management?
   User interface and functionality are important aspects to consider as well. Whether you want increased accountability within your IT department or want to implement different privileges based on users, you want to make sure your provider offers a service that fits your needs. [Alert, alert]. For instance, at DNS Made Easy, you can add sub-users for your account with role-based permissions, and at our sister company Constellix, you can get even more granular and assign user permissions and receive a full security audit to track changes made per user. It’s all about what fits your organization’s needs.
   
   
4. Are your servers on- or off-site?
   Another important thing to consider is server location. Are your services exclusively cloud-based or are you planning to implement a multi-cloud strategy? If your servers are located on-site, you may wish to incorporate vanity DNS for security precautions, or even for branding purposes.
   
   
5. Is your traffic mostly regionally based or worldwide?
   Don’t make the mistake of discounting the importance of where your traffic is or will be coming from. One thing you want to research is a DNS provider’s Points of Presence (PoP). The more the merrier approach is best when it comes to PoPs, but you also want to ensure your provider has servers located in areas that cover the majority of where your traffic comes from. This will ensure that your queries are resolved quickly and efficiently. Another point of consideration is where you may not want traffic to be coming from.
   
   Did you know?: DNS Made Easy’s Global Traffic Director can steer traffic based on region? And that for more advanced needs, Constellix can even filter traffic by IP address with IP filtering?
   
   
6. Do you offer up a lot of content that is graphic intensive?
   If your domains are graphic and video intensive, you may want to look into multi-cloud solutions, which help deliver your content faster. Think twice before putting all your eggs in one basket though! Using one CSP can sometimes lead to vendor lock-in, slower speeds, or worse, outages. [Sound the alarm: product description coming]. DNS Made Easy offers Secondary DNS and can easily be implemented alongside multiple cloud services to ensure your domain has 100% uptime. Constellix, our more advanced DNS monitoring suite, offers a Multi-CDN Management solution that lets you manage all your CDNs in one place while also providing constant uptime and industry-leading speeds.
   
   
7. How many domains does your organization have or manage?
   The number of domains your company has or manages is also something to consider before configuring your DNS. If you only have one or two domains, you may only need a simple DNS configuration. If you have multiple domains, you may require a service that can help you better manage them. But even if you need something simple now, be sure to choose a DNS provider that is built to scale and make sure you know the costs that scaling entails before signing the dotted line. You can see our top three recommended DNS configurations here.
   
   
8. Are you in an industry that is prone to DDoS or other cyber attacks?
   If you’re in an industry that’s frequently targeted by DDoS attacks, such as gaming sites, educational platforms, online retailers, government, and news sites, it’s critical that you have DNS protocols in place to keep your domain(s) up and running. With options such as Failover, Secondary DNS, or Multi-CDN solutions, you can easily and effectively thwart attacks—and you don’t have to break the bank to do it.
   
   
9. Will you need analytics and data on your traffic patterns?
   You may think DNS analytics isn’t important, but it can help more than you realize. [Warning: All attempts to avoid self-promotion have failed]. For instance, our Real-time Traffic Anomaly Detection (RTTAD) solution is like having Professor X on your DNS team. While it might not be able to control anomalies, it can detect suspicious activity (aka evil mutants) and help stop attacks before they happen. It even gives you a historical glance at your domain traffic

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Did you know?: RTTAD can even help with your marketing efforts by showing you which pages are queried most, can help you pinpoint inconsistencies, spot stale data, and so much more.

DNS Keeps the Internet Moving

While DNS is essentially “invisible,” it’s the backbone of the internet. Without it, it’d be nearly impossible to surf the web as we’re used to today. Can you imagine trying to memorize and type out every single IP address for every site you visit? There’s nearly 2 billion websites in existence! And while no one is going to be visiting that many sites, even in a lifetime, trying to surf the net via IP addresses would make your brain crash quicker than trying to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a potato PC.

In short, don’t neglect your DNS. Regardless of who you ultimately choose for your DNS service [choose us], keeping these nine points in mind will help ensure your DNS strategy is a success.

If you liked this, you might find these helpful:

https://www.f5.com/company/blog/dns-is-not-the-first-thing-that-comes-to-mind-in-a-crisis

https://www.register.es/en/blog/110-what-s-so-important-about-dns

https://bit.ly/34y4Gp7

https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2019/02/21/can-the-dns-have-an-impact-on-the-seo/

For information on Constellix or DNS Made Easy products and services contact us. Our specialists will be happy to discuss your specific needs and work with you to find the perfect DNS solutions for your business.