As this week’s Amazon Web Services outage demonstrated, Website uptime is not something to be taken for granted.
Whether it’s caused by a service provider going down, a DDoS attack or a sudden surge in traffic, having your Website go down can knock the wind out of your business. Most bigger organizations can recover from an outage, but for small and medium-sized businesses, even an hour of downtime can cost you in terms of revenue, not to mention customer patience and loyalty. For smaller operations, a major outage could spell the end of the business.
One sometimes-overlooked aspect of what keeps a Website accessible is its DNS settings. As Wikileaks learned the hard way late last year, losing DNS service can effectively remove one’s site from the Internet, unless users happen to know its IP address by heart (we’ve yet to witness quite this level of brand loyalty).
Seventy-three percent of SMBs don’t believe their sites could handle a 200% increase in traffic, according to a survey conducted by Neustar, a Website infrastructure and DNS services provider. Only 7% could handle a 300% increase. In the event of a major DDoS attack, many of these sites would be toast.
Of course, that kind of growth could also come from a sudden surge in customer interest, which is great, but not of much value if your Website infrastructure isn’t ready for it.
Either way, DNS is typically the first line of defense and having a solid provider in place is key.
Of IT decision makers polled in the Neustar survey, 30% generally tend to recommend free or low-cost services when possible and 46% said they recommend the best option and compromise with their CFO from there.
While budgets are tight for SMBs, selecting a DNS provider is one are where pinching pennies isn’t worth it. Thankfully, only 16% of respondents said they were using a free hosted DNS service, while 38% used the DNS options included by their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Twenty-two percent said they use paid, hosted DNS while 24% use some kind of DIY DNS server.
Are you confident that your DNS provider is scalable and secure? Any nightmare stories to share? Let us know in the comments.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user abdallahh
