Faster DNS for Faster Site Resolution
Anthony Eden
on
At DNSimple, we're focused on providing innovative technology for fast, easy domain management. In this post, we'll talk more about fast, and how that impacts and improves your DNS.
Three major components to your DNS speed are response times, servers, and record propagation. When evaluating your DNS management for speed, you need to ask:
Does your provider answer your DNS queries in 20 milliseconds or less?
Does your current provider offer Anycast on every plan?
Does your provider distribute your DNS changes to all authoritative name servers in 60 seconds or less?
Let's go over the details of why these are critical to your DNS management.
Fast response times
Fast DNS response times mean faster loading times, and fewer visitors leaving your site because they don't want to wait for it to load. There's also research indicating your response times could influence your SEO. The loading time of your web page impacts the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), and misconfiguration can affect your SEO results.
DNSimple's Authoritative DNS consistently ranks at the top of DNSPerf's rankings, with average response times around 20ms for raw performance and 16ms from resolvers. So no matter which plan you choose, you'll get the same high-speed performance for all your domains.
Unicast vs Anycast
All providers serve your DNS through either Unicast or Anycast. Unicast DNS servers handle DNS requests from a single location, whereas Anycast servers handle DNS requests from many locations. With Anycast, the location with the shortest path from your visitor will be used.
For example, if your DNS provider is serving through Unicast in Chicago, and your visitor is in Tokyo, the request will need to travel all the way from Tokyo to Chicago and back again. With Anycast, the same address is broadcast from many locations, so your visitor's DNS query will go to the server closest to them.
Anycast also ensures that if one server goes down, your site doesn't go down with it. You'll be re-routed to the next closest server so your customers can still access your business. If your provider uses Unicast and the server goes down, your site is down until the server is fixed.
Some providers reserve Anycast for only their most expensive plans. All domains at DNSimple are served through Anycast using our global network of DNS servers. Your zones will be deployed to all of our locations, resulting in fast lookups for your customers and peace of mind for you. You can read a more in-depth explanation in our documentation
Fast record updates
As a managed DNS provider, we're strongly committed to providing the most effective service to our customers. Part of that is providing fast, automatic updates for any changes to your zones.
When you make a change to one of your zones you have hosted with DNSimple, we use a proprietary mechanism to update the records at all our name servers across the world in seconds. This ensures they begin propagating as soon as you've made an update to your records, regardless of where someone is trying to access your site. You can also use our API to check your zone distribution among our name servers — take a look at the Zones API section of our developer documentation for more details.
Fast resolution on every plan
DNSimple provides all of the above resources on every single plan. Whether you have one domain or thousands, we'll make sure your response times are speedy and your site resolves quickly no matter where your customers are located.
If you're ready to experience simple, secure DNS management, give us a try free for 30 days. Have more questions? Not quite sure what your DNS needs are? Drop us a line - we'd love to chat.
Anthony Eden
I break things so Simone continues to have plenty to do. I occasionally have useful ideas, like building a domain and DNS provider that doesn't suck.
We think domain management should be easy.
That's why we continue building DNSimple.
