Everybody wants to avoid DNS downtime! Unfortunately, it affects your reputation, annoys your loyal and potential clients, and costs you money.

DNS downtime is the time your domain name won’t be resolved to its corresponding IP address. During that time, clients won’t be able to use your service or load your domain. An error will be pointed out every time they request it.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the keystone for the Internet to work. No matter its dimension and importance, it also suffers from vulnerabilities, hacking attempts, software and hardware issues, networks’ problems, database corruption, etc. And if it stops, your domain also will.

How can you prevent DNS downtime?

To know that prevention is possible, it’s always good news, especially when your investment is at risk!

• Set up a higher TTL (time-to-live) on your DNS records. Recursive servers’ job involves looking for updates on authoritative name servers. If you configure a high TTL value, recursive servers will look for updates less often. But with a low TTL value, they will look for updates more frequently. A low TTL is really convenient when you modify or edit DNS records because it accelerates the propagation process. If you don’t need constant changes, keep a higher TTL to avoid downtime. If your authoritative name server fails, a high TTL increases the chances for a copy of your DNS records to remain longer in the cache of a recursive. Thus your domain will still be loaded for clients, and you get more time for fixing the problem.
• Use Secondary DNS servers. Increase redundancy while adding Secondary servers to your DNS network. More copies of your DNS records will be stored through this action, and you will manage your traffic more efficiently. No matter if your Primary DNS server gets suddenly in trouble, the Secondary ones will answer your clients’ requests.
• Monitor the DNS server exhaustively. Every uncommon traffic pattern can mean something important. Get a proficient monitoring tool. Some can show you almost in real-time the information, by region, country, continent, etc., for you to diagnose the problem, its origin, and react.
• Enable DNS Failover. This is an ideal teammate for monitoring, and due to its flexibility, it can be configured with the most convenient parameters for your business. Data obtained from monitoring can be connected to the DNS Failover. If a DNS nameserver fails, DNS Failover will automatically redirect the traffic from the server facing the issue to a healthy one. DNS resolution will continue working, despite your server’s problems.
• Use DNS load balancing. This is a useful mechanism for distributing traffic across servers. For working, it considers factors such as the number of active connections, connection time, etc. By having two or more servers, DNS load balancing will manage traffic, for servers to have kind of the same amount of work, not to be sluggish or very stressed. It’s an efficient way to manage traffic spikes that can be normal or a symptom of malicious activity in progress. It directly boosts performance, prevents security issues and downtime. If a server fails or gets compromised, another will answer your clients’ requests. 
• Strength your defenses against DDoS attacks. These threats involve enormous amounts of traffic overwhelming your system. Anti-DDoS technology protects your servers to resist such traffic.

Conclusion

You can prevent DNS downtime! There are easy or more complex alternatives. Your business’ needs will define the right one or the appropriate combination of them. Decide it today, and keep your business always up!