Cloud-based DNS outperforms in-house systems, study shows

We came across an article today that was written almost a year ago in Computer World that we all found interesting (and affirming of what we do). A new vendor-sponsored study of the 1,000 biggest websites quantifies how much better third-party managed service providers are doing at operating DNS services across the Internet than enterprises that run this critical network service themselves. U.S. websites that operate their own DNS services experience availability that is significantly lower — averaging minutes of costly downtime per day — when compared to sites that outsource their DNS.

Naturally, we would also lump enterprises (or businesses of any size, for that matter) that rely on their ISP for DNS into the same category as those that run it in-house. The reason for this is due to the fact that running a large and highly available DNS service is not the core business of enterprises, or even ISPs. It is always a sideline and in the case of ISPs, it is often a free service provided without any sort of Service Level Agreement, something that is exceedingly critical for today’s leading online businesses where, as the article points out, even a tiny reduction in website availability [as a result of a DNS issue] can result in lost customers and revenue. We would go even farther to add that even if a business does not sell online, the absence of its website for short periods of time due to any reason (including DNS) has the tendency to injure the reputation.

You can read the entire article at Computer World.