You may have read the title of this blog and thought to yourself, “That makes no sense. How can DNS be the MVP of Super Bowl 2021?” Aside from the fact that it hasn’t happened yet, it actually does make sense. A lot of sense.

Next to the Thanksgiving holidays and Cyber Monday, the Super Bowl generates the largest amount of online traffic each year. And with a global pandemic thrown into the mix, online activity and the demand for streaming will increase exponentially for Super Bowl 2021. In fact, last year’s Super Bowl saw a 23% increase in streaming—about 7.4 million viewers. 

So, you might want to make sure your business is ready for the biggest virtual sporting event in history! Just saying.

“On average, we run 150 billion queries per day.” says Steven Job, President of DNS Made Easy and Constellix.”We routinely see a 12-17% increase in queries year over year on Super Bowl Sunday, and our projections show queries increasing to at least 185 billion for Super Bowl Sunday 2021.”

On top of the projected increase in traffic, there’s some big money spent for the Super Bowl. We’re talking upwards of 6 million for just a 30-second commercial! Are you prepared to let that much money flush down the drain because of an outage or a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack?

Don’t think it “can’t happen to you.” Because it can.

What do you think keeps the Super Bowl streams, your fantasy football sites, or for that matter, any website you visit up and running? Domain Name System. All guts, no glory. 

You can think of DNS as kind of like a referee. It may not be glamorous or exciting to the average person, and it’ll probably never get the “props” it deserves, but without DNS, not much would happen on the internet. It’d be utter chaos. 

Essentially, DNS is like a silent partner that works in the background so that individual businesses and their websites can shine, but never gets the credit. 

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How DNS Can Keep Your Domains Protected

Over the years, DNS Made Easy and Constellix have supplied critical back-end services for major Cloud Communications Platforms and played an integral role in keeping their domains live during Super Bowl games and other major events throughout the years.

The best defense is a good offense. 
And DNS Made Easy and Constellix have both sides covered. Our services are unique in that we can protect and defend on the DNS level. Our servers are designed to check for the fastest, healthiest resources continuously. If something doesn’t look right, we call an audible.

Let’s talk offense. I’ll use our Sonar health checks and our Real-time Anomaly Detection (RTTAD) services as an example. These services perform similarly to a quarterback reading a play. The quarterback, in this case, Sonar or RTTAD, reads your query traffic and reacts accordingly. 

This is where the defense kicks in.
Whether it’s because of an influx in traffic due to an event like the Super Bowl or a DDoS attack during the Super Bowl, your domain is essentially being blitzed. It’s crucial that you have a service that’s able to see it coming and stop the blitz before it can make you fumble the ball. 

Or in this case, go offline. 
Once our “offense” reads the play (traffic) and sees the current approach won’t work against the other “team’s” (traffic or attack) defensive strategy, an audible is called, such as Failover. 

But since our services offer such a good offense, you’re alerted right away when anomalies occur and can set up IP filtering rules (Constellix only) to block suspicious traffic, or to divert traffic to another service.

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Make Sure Your Business is Prepared

It’s pivotal that your domains and content delivery platforms are protected during Super Bowl 2021. In 2020, there were nearly 100 million US viewers, and with COVID-19 still affecting daily lives, there will likely be a substantial increase this year as more people will be watching the game from home or from mobile devices, or hosting virtual Super Bowl parties.

Not only will your platform see a large increase in traffic, but Super Bowl Sunday is a big target for hackers. You can’t afford to risk having holes in your DNS strategy! Preparation is key. Whether you want a DNS service that can play offense and defense or you want Secondary DNS as a safety net, DNS Made Easy and Constellix have you covered.

You don’t want to fumble your DNS. Not now. Not ever. But especially not during an event like the Super Bowl.