Last week, the social media giant Facebook suffered some unnecessary downtime that they are now blaming on an error that occurred when a change was made to their DNS infrastructure.

“Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

DNS is the core or backbone of the Internet, without it, the Internet would be a much different place; harder to navigate and browse. We talk all the time about how much downtime caused by mother nature, traffic overloads, and other issues can cost your website, but what about user error?

What can you do to safeguard your website against unnecessary downtime due to user error? Simple, out into practice this 5 tips for DNS management.

1. Only allow authorized and knowledgeable people access to DNS accounts
2. Triple check any updates and changes
3. Monitor your DNS. Make sure it is always running and that it is resolving to the proper address. We suggest using Nagios or Pingdom.
4. Don’t let your domain name expire on accident. Register it for a few years at a time, or let it auto-renew.
5. Make sure your DNS Servers are patched and if available, updated to their latest version to avoid vulnerabilities

Who manages your websites DNS? Have you ever had downtime due to errors in DNS updates? What do you do to safeguard your website against downtime?