Adding new Name Servers

Since we started offering hosting and other services to our clients we’ve always taken pride in reinvesting in our technical infrastructure and services. Over the past few years we’ve expanded our network and made it more resilient, while also investing in becoming ISO certified.

DNS is something that most of our clients rely on. It’s very important, but if it’s working properly it’s almost invisible.

We’re delighted to announce that from Monday the 14th of November 2016 we will start adding extra redundancy and capacity to our DNS offering.

The ‘Non Geeky bit’:

When a customer of yours or a visitor of your website types in your website address or clicks on a link in a search engine your computer asks your broadband provider where to send the customer. When your customers are in the same country as you this works fine using just our normal DNS servers. The same could be said for European customers. However, customers in North and South America, Asia / Asia Pacific, African regions etc., will benefit from this change.

From November 10th, we will be adding 2 additional DNS servers which are located around the world and will help your customers outside of Ireland get to your website faster than ever before. It also means if you use Blacknight for DNS but point your website to another service or provider you’ll see the same benefit. While there are only two additional nameservers they use a technology called “anycast” which means that we are actually using way more than two servers and they’re physically located in multiple countries and data centres.

Do you need to do anything to avail of this?

No. Nothing. We’re going to update all the registries and registrars for all domains that we control to have this facility made available to you at no additional cost.

The ‘Geeky bit’:

This will be achieved by adding two extra name servers to domains registered with Blacknight. We will be adding ns3.blacknight.com and ns4.blacknight.com which will both use anycast and have both IPv4 and IPv6 records.

As mentioned above these Name Servers will be using the anycast routing technique increasing our level of service and reliability throughout the globe.

DNS stands for Domain Name System and DNS Servers maintain a directory of domain names and translate them to IP addresses.

You don’t need to take any action as this will be automatically populated by our systems without any impact to domains.