DNS isn’t sexy or exciting, but it’d be impossible to visit a website, send an email or do pretty much anything online without it. Unfortunately it’s one of those services that many people tend to overlook as it’s very often a “freebie” included with domain registration or hosting services.
However DNS is crucial.
It’s the foundation for the internet. If you build on bad foundations or don’t do it properly then no matter what you build it can never be stable.
But DNS is to many practically invisible. In some ways that’s probably a good thing, but if it’s working badly then stuff simply does not work properly if at all.
Here at Blacknight we have always been very conscious that the technical infrastructure is crucial to the services that we provide to our clients. That’s why we have invested millions of Euro over the past 15+ years in hardware, network and people. While much of this investment might not be visible without it we know that the level of service we offer would be impacted.
For the last few year we have been offering ANYCAST DNS with domains registered through ourselves.
ANYCAST means that while you might only “see” a few servers associated with a domain’s DNS in reality each nameserver record can represent many many servers in different parts of the world. This means that the system is more resilient, more secure and generally faster. We explained a bit about this when we first introduced ANYCAST a few years ago.
We recently switched our ANYCAST DNS over to using Afilias. You might not know who Afilias are, but they’re one of the biggest players in the DNS and domain space with their technology powering many of the domains you visit or interact with each and every single day.
As I said in the press release that went out yesterday:
DNS is the glue that holds the internet together and we’re excited to have moved to the Afilias Anycast DNS Network for our hosted domain customers,” said Michele Neylon, CEO of Blacknight. “Our number one priority for our customers is always service stability and security which is why we chose Afilias.
What does this mean for you as a Blacknight client?
If your domains are registered directly with us and using our DNS then you should see that they’ll automatically end up with 4 nameservers usually within a few hours of domain registration or transfer:
ns1.blacknight.com
ns2.blacknight.com
ns3.blacknight.com
ns4.blacknight.com
So no matter where anyone is in the world they should be able to reach your site or other service quickly and reliably.
Of course DNS isn’t the only thing you need to be thinking about when you’re running an online business. So if you need to upgrade your hosting or maybe add an extra layer of security to your domains you should let us know.