DNS outage – Definition and Details
DNS outage is the time when your Domain Name System goes down for any reason (your nameservers are hit, overloaded, etc. ), and the server can’t resolve your domain name to its IP address. The first step in entering a website is to resolve the DNS. Without it, the browser won’t know where your website is located, and it won’t be able to find its content. In addition, visitors who want to access your domain will see an error message and cannot access your site.
So, we can say that a DNS outage is when website guests type your website’s name (domain name) into their device and can’t load it (they are not routed to its IP address).
What can cause a DNS outage?
- Configuration errors. DNS outages can be caused by various human errors when configuring DNS. Script errors, incorrectly typed IP addresses, firewall configuration issues, etc.
- The upkeep of authoritative name servers. Updates or reboots are occasionally required as part of routine maintenance. This disables the server’s ability to respond to DNS requests.
- DDoS and DoS attacks. The purpose of Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service is to cause a failure of the service. You will experience a DNS outage if they succeed.
- An occurrence in the data center (the location of the name server). The “cloud” is situated in a data center or multiple data centers, not in the sky. And while such locations are safe, they are not foolproof. Especially when it comes to natural disasters, power outages, and other issues.
How to prevent it?
Of fact, you could protect yourself against it, and there are some steps you can do to avoid future DNS outages:
- Secondary domain name service. The most straightforward approach that could save you is to employ a secondary DNS server in most circumstances. Ideally, with a different DNS provider. The secondary DNS will let you have additional authoritative DNS servers that can still answer to queries even if the primary DNS is unavailable. The more, the merrier.
- Load balancing. You can set up your nameservers to distribute traffic between them using load balancing. So, you can be sure that the load is not going on one of them. The performance and resilience of your DNS network will be improved by spreading the heavy load.
- Protection against DDoS attacks. A DDoS attack is often the cause of a domain name problem. Furthermore, traffic attacks have become relatively inexpensive, and it is usual for hackers, sometimes hired by your competitors, to pull your domain down. So, what can you do? You can get DDoS protection for your Domain Name System servers that can withstand heavy load.
Conclusion
We can infer that a DNS outage is highly harmful and can cause significant damage to your business. Therefore, take the appropriate steps to avoid this from happening, such as implementing Secondary DNS, a Load Balancing method, and DDoS protection. This will provide you peace of mind that your Domain Name System is in good working order.