Early this morning, three of WordPress.com’s data centers were successfully taken down by a major DDoS attack. WordPress is describing it as the largest one in it’s history. The following is an excerpt from their blog

“WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.
We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward. We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us via xxxxx@wordpress.com for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available.”

DDoS attacks happen. Is your business protected?  What can help your business survive a DDoS attack? Anycast. Anycast is a routing and networking method.  In this method, the same IP address is allocated to multiple name servers or hosts that all behave the same way, carry the same content and are capable of answering the same queries.  These name servers are located in various locations across the globe. Anycast automatically directs your customers to the name server that is located closest to them.

So, why is Anycast DNS so important?

Anycast makes DNS more reliable. Instead of traffic being sent to one name server, traffic is diverted to many different name servers.  If one server is congested, another server can take some of the load.

Anycast improves performance. We are a generation of instant gratification and one of my biggest pet peeves is waiting for a website to load. With Anycast, your customers can connect to a name server that is located closest to them, therefore reducing the amount of time it takes to receive the query. If the name server is located in California all queries from the west coast will be fast, but if the query is from New York, the queries will be slow, and queries from London will be even slower.  Anycast solves this problem and assures that all of your traffic is fast, no matter where the query is coming from.

Increase resilience to Internet Based Attacks. With multiple name servers available, attacks are mitigated and often concentrated to one server, rather than taking down the entire network.  Queries can be diverted to another name server in this instance, therefore causing no interruption of service.

Maintenance can be performed without any interruptions in service. During regular maintenance, DNS traffic is simply routed to the next available name server, therefore your customers are never without service.

Anycast DNS is great way to improve performance and resiliency of your network.

Since 2007, No-IP has been using IP anycast on some of our name server (NS) records. In the coming months all Managed and Backup DNS NS records will use anycast. Contact us today to learn more about what No-IP.com has to offer and how we can help implement Anycast DNS for your business!