Have you considered how your domain name can affect website uptime, not just the web hosting server?
A domain name is a crucial aspect of web hosting, it manages details of where your web hosting and email servers are located in order for web users to connect to your website and send you emails. Think of it like a telephone directory holding the number people can contact you on. Without these details, when a user enters your domain name, their browser or emails just won’t know how to find your website or where to send emails. They see the dreaded “page not found” message!
The domain settings are managed by a “nameserver” and is often the company you registered the domain with, but it doesn’t have to be. It is common to designate an alternative company to manage domain name settings (DNS).
The problem is, if the nameserver that manages your domain name settings goes down or has a network issue, then your website and emails will go down because browsers won’t be able to retrieve the details of the server your website and emails are hosted on.
That’s where Amity’s DNS backup service for our premium web hosting customers comes in. We designate multiple and (importantly) unrelated nameservers to control the domain name settings. In effect, two different “telephone directories” are holding the details where your website and emails are.
“How does this help my website stay up more often?” I hear you ask… Well, as stated, if your nameserver goes down for whatever reason, other servers in the internet don’t know where to send the user visiting your site or to send emails. But having two or more unrelated nameservers managing the domain settings means when one is down, servers just look up the details with the other, and then connect the user.
In our experience we often see DNS issues. Sometimes they are brief, where a website goes down for 5 minutes or so, sometimes they go down for a lot longer when the domain company is under a denial of service attack from malicious users and hackers. It happens often.
Having DNS backup will mean your website and emails will still stay up and be accessible by everyone even when one of the nameserver companies go down.
All our premium hosted customers that we manage domains for have DNS backup using the original domain registration company and Rackspace DNS, a leading provider of cloud services, ensuring our customers and websites have even more uptime.
To find out more about our premium web hosting, please email us.