Do you know what is mostly responsible for keeping all of your favorite websites online during all those amazing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales?
“eMarketer predicts 23.5% of all US retail ecommerce sales this year will take place in November and December, amounting to $61.8 billion. eMarketer estimates US retail ecommerce sales will grow 16.4% to $262.3 billion this year.” What do these additional sales and traffic do to websites though, and how are they able to handle the extra traffic?
Holiday shopping brought to you by managed DNS.
Load balancing is one of the most important parts of managed DNS, sure a DNS provider could have lots of points of presence (servers in different locations) across the globe, but if the architecture of the network isn’t built properly, your DNS can still have issues. If you launch a “30% off everything sale” on your website, and traffic surges, it is possible to take out an entire server if too many queries overload it. This then cripples your site, meaning your sale was utterly pointless because your website couldn’t handle the load.
DNS and Managed DNS are, for the most part, a secret. Oftentimes, they are only brought up when some sort of DNS attack is occurring on a website, only to gain it’s 15 minutes of fame and then quietly slip back into secrecy. DNS is very important though. Upticks in traffic to a website can cause major issues. If the DNS isn’t managed properly, it can even cripple it.
DNS is very important and it should play a critical role in your businesses digital footprint. Check out the following checklist to ensure your website is prepared.
1. Do you manage your DNS internally? Do you have a backup hosting provider? If your primary host goes down, a second hosting provider can still divert your traffic to the right place. (Just make sure your offline settings are directed to a different IP address)
2. Monitor it! If your site goes out at 2am, will you know immediately, or will you have to wait until 9am when a customer finally calls in to ask whats up with your site? 5 minutes of downtime isn’t good, let alone hours! With server monitoring, you will get notifications the second something goes wrong with your site.
3. Failover support? What if your site does go down? So you are notified, but what will you do? If you have failover support, your traffic can be diverted to another IP address, web site or to a custom web page stored on our servers. When your service comes back up online, we will will undo the failover settings and normal operations will continue. Your site and customers won’t miss a beat.
What can you do to ensure that your website is able to handle the traffic? How is the architecture of your managed DNS provider structured? Does your DNS provider have many points of presence located across the globe hosted on distinct networks, or just a few? Is the network supported by Anycast DNS? Is it globally redundant? No-IP Plus Managed DNS is the perfect solution for easily managing your websites DNS. We are proud to say that since 1999, our network has had 100% Uptime, because let’s face it, there are no upsides to downtime.
Our DNS Experts will ensure that your website is fast, reliable, and available. Guaranteed. Any other tips for keeping your holiday traffic in check? Leave them below! Also, if you like this article, be sure to share it on Facebook and Twitter!