The Internet’s Underpants!

DNS is essential for your site’s visitors to find its IP address. With our multiple-location DNS monitoring, we’ve discovered some really interesting things, and (since we haven’t seen this sort of data published elsewhere) have decided to start collecting and sharing the information.

DNS failures, it turns out, are highly provider- and region-specific, with some providers performing excellently in certain regions while experiencing significant issues in others. Hidden without thousands of multi-continent multi-provider checks, these infrastructure issues are not generally available to view.

The data below shows what we’ve collected so far, and is recalculated once per 24 hours. Data more than 30 days old is not included.

Click any provider name to see a breakdown per location, or click a location to see its data broken down by provider.

Notes:

These partial-DNS outages, as we call them, are EXTREMELY COMMON but not necessarily reflected in your own site dashboard. By default, as long as we can get your web server to respond normally, we don’t classify these as outages. Instead, we use the DNS data diagnostically when providing notifications and recommendations for outage resolution.
If you want to see for yourself how this affects your sites? Simple: in Account Settings, enable “Count any DNS failure as an outage?” and watch the outages accumulate. If you’re REALLY curious and want an email each time one happens, set your notification threshold and uptime checking interval per site to 5 minutes. ALTERNATIVELY, you could just turn off notifications for disputed outages (via account settings) or set a longer notification threshold so only longer-lasting DNS issues will create emails. All outages will, of course, be downloadable regardless of your notification settings.

Methods and Limitations

We don’t publish even aggregated customer information per our privacy policy, so we cannot give out either the total number of DNS provider failures we’ve collected (many thousands, though) or the failure rate per provider. This is strictly a head-to-head comparison of the frequency of failures per provider and per location.
We ONLY count partial failures here, meaning it’s only a failure if at least one other DNS provider successfully resolved an IP address at (roughly) the same time and from the same location. This is intended to weed out actually-misconfigured website data.
To avoid location-specific data skew, we only collect this information from sites that are monitored from all locations (some are restricted due to geolocation settings or user preference in Scarecrow).
We do experiment with additional DNS providers and locations (but will not show results until we have collected data for at least 30 days), and are willing to consider adding additional locations.

If you have suggestions or input, please contact us.

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