Your DNS provider is one of the most important, and most overlooked, parts of your website infrastructure. In October 2016, a massive attack on a major DNS provider knocked some of the biggest websites in the world offline for hours, and it is still one of the best examples of why choosing and monitoring the right DNS provider matters for every business.
On October 21, 2016, reports began coming in of widespread outages across the internet. Major online companies were suddenly unreachable, and it quickly became clear this was not a coincidence. A large scale DDoS attack had been launched against Dyn, a DNS provider used by many of the largest brands online, including Amazon, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter and PayPal.
How One DNS Provider Outage Affected So Many Companies
A DNS provider acts like the phone book of the internet, translating a website address like thinkbigwebsites.com into the server location your browser needs to connect to. When that DNS provider goes down, every website relying on it becomes unreachable, even if those websites themselves have nothing wrong with them. This is exactly what happened during the Dyn attack. Because so many major brands relied on the same DNS provider, one attack was able to take down a huge portion of the internet at once.
The attack also affected businesses less directly. Any service, like PayPal, that used DynDNS in the background could have been impacted even if a visitor never noticed the connection. The larger providers worked quickly to mitigate the attack, but it remained an ongoing issue for hours, which is why monitoring your website during any major internet event is so important.
What This Means for Your Business Today
Most small and mid sized businesses never think about their DNS provider until something goes wrong. A few simple steps can help protect your website from this kind of outage.
- Choose a DNS provider with a strong track record of uptime and fast attack mitigation.
- Consider using more than one DNS provider for redundancy if your business depends heavily on your website.
- Monitor your website uptime so you know immediately if something goes down, rather than finding out from a customer.
- Work with a web team that understands hosting and DNS, not just design, so these issues get caught early.
Want more information on how DNS servers work or want us to review your current setup? Our team can take a look at your hosting and DNS provider as part of a full website design review. Contact us today and we will help make sure your business is protected.