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New Site Feature: DNS Watch

Yesterday we launched DNS Watch, sharing some continent-spanning infrastructure data we happened to notice a while back.

To be clear, we are not sharing user data at all here. It’s merely that, when one DNS provider fails but at least one other succeeds, we see this as a problem. Ideally, showing this information to the world will inspire some cleanup in the DNS-provider space.

DNS servers are responsible for “resolving” domain names into IP addresses. If they don’t work? People can’t access websites and resources. On the bright side, some of us are set up with more than one DNS server, so if one fails we fall back to another. But not all of us.

Will this help? We don’t know. But we have seen the patterns in the data for some time. We don’t share even aggregate customer/user information, so our new DNS error tracking system doesn’t store any in the first place. Specifically, it stores a count of DNS provider errors per day per provider…and nothing else. DNS errors that affect ALL providers are not stored, as this is much more likely to be a site-configuration issue, or a regional outage.

We DO strongly suspect that the “nameserver” chosen for a given website by its technical administrators does affect reliability here–that DNS provided by these minor players may not be as reliable as going directly to the bigger DNS companies–but (a) we do NOT check to see a user’s site’s nameservers in the first place, since in our minds this would be a violation of user privacy (it’s public information, but nobody asked us to look), thus we cannot store this information, and (b) there might be another issue anyway: frequently-accessed sites’ DNS information is much more likely to be cached, and larger sites tend to use larger DNS providers, so the relationship might be unclear even if we had the data. Which we emphatically do not.

Anyway. Before we started monitoring DNS so exhaustively, we had no idea these obvious-in-hindsight issues even existed. So it was a surprise.

And, hey, think about who provides DNS for your site(s)? Again, we can prove nothing here. But, anecdotally, via talking to various business owners about issues, we do suspect a pattern. Although…we’re not really in favor of preferring huge corporate DNS servers in the first place, so we’re a bit conflicted on the topic.

Carry on. Maybe check out the page? It’s fascinating stuff, for those who are easily fascinated by the inner workings of the internet.