DNS – boring but really important

This past week our DNS hosting provider Register.com was experiencing problems due to a massive denial of service attack. DNS for the less geeky means domain name server. What DNS does is to translate www.cosential.com into an ip address 63.240.68.126.  When Register.com had problems, our customers could not get to Cosential’s website even though all of our systems were just fine. This problem happened intermittently throughout the last two days. 1 minute our website was accessable and the next minute it was not. DNS is a 30 year old technology and rarely has this been a problem. Register.com is one of the largest providers on the Internet.

We added a bunch of backup DNS servers on different providers. You can have up to 12 DNS servers on your domain so we moved to a few new places. Some large and some small to widen the target.  Anyone who has a website or email account should reexamine how and how their DNS is being served. I am suggesting to all of our customers that they move DNS for their email servers to at least two providers.  In this mission critical world, it is very important that the boring stuff stays that way.