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DNS matters! A case study.

A customer asked me about a series of disputed outages. It turned out he’d recently migrated from one DNS nameserver to another.

We looked at the data, and saw some very interesting patterns. Let’s look at the sequence of events:

1. Customer chose Squarespace as a DNS nameserver (responsible for providing an IP address so customers can find your site)
2. First, there was some kind of import process that did not actually include all DNS records.
3. The customer’s domain was assigned to what looks like a “parked” domain setup, meaning that the domain was treated as if it had no actual website associated with it.
4. This meant that “parked” IP addresses were served.
5. Obviously none of the correct website content was present, but…
6. ALSO, some of the IP addresses returned certificate/security errors, thus causing the disputed outages. Most of the Scarecrow checks were fine, but not all. So this looks like a separate infrastructure problem. Too.
7. This situation has lasted for a few days now.

I want to focus on that last. We at Scarecrow do not monitor Squarespace (although we do monitor other providers), and in fact I personally had never heard of them. I don’t know what happened during the DNS record transfer process; we’ll leave that alone.

But, really, days? DNS propagation should not take that long. We see, in the data, that different DNS providers are reporting different IP addresses from different locations. In other words, it’s all messed up. Some of the user’s customers get the correct website. Others do not.

I also found this post on Reddit, which may or may not be accurate. And of course it could be obsolete information even if accurate.

That said? I, personally, would be cautious in choosing a DNS provider. This customer’s site has been screwed up for days.

And that’s not good.