What does SEO (Search Engine Optimization) mean?

The SEO abbreviation stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the process of improving your website so that it can rank better on search engines’ results. The search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, and Yandex create their own algorithms based on factors like content quality, keywords used, loading speed, and others to evaluate sites and rank them on their search pages in their free results. They usually have paid results in the beginning and free results after that. Site owners compete for the free results by constantly improving many aspects of their sites.

Some of the top SEO factors that search engines take into consideration are:

• Security – does the site uses a TLS certificate?
• Loading speed – how fast do the domain and all the elements of the site load?
• Mobile-friendliness – how well is it optimized for mobile (smartphone) use?
• Content quality – how well are the texts and articles written, and how well are the keywords selected?
• Crawlability – how easy is it for search engine bots to search the content on the site?
• Website structure – is there a good structure of menus, categories, articles, etc.?
• Backlinks – are the important sites that lead to the particular site?
• User experience – how good is the total experience for the visitors of the site?

The algorithms are not public, but SEO specialists have already understood many of the factors that strongly improve a site’s ranking. Those that we just mentioned are vital for getting a good position.

What is DNS (Domain Name System)?

Domain Name System, or DNS for short, is a decentralized hierarchical structure that links domain names (computers, services, resources, etc.) to their IP addresses (IPv4 or IPv6 addresses). It also links much more additional information information.

People like to compare it to a phonebook in which they can search for domain names like Wikipedia.org and find the IP addresses behind them without remembering long strings of numbers like 91.198.174.192 or 2620:0:862:ed1a::1. It makes everything easier both for humans and machines.

DNS was created in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris from the Internet Engineering Task Force – IETF. The main purpose of the DNS was to change the ever-growing HOSTS.TXT file that people needed to use to find hosts (computers) and to pave the road to the modern interconnected network called the Internet that was just getting popular at that time.

DNS history. When and why was DNS created?

Every time when somebody requests a new domain, his or her browser or application will perform a DNS query for the domain’s IP address. The request will travel a long way. First, it will visit the highest level of the DNS hierarchy called DNS root servers. Then, they will direct to the correct top-level domain server (TLD), based on the extension of the domain like .com. Finally, the TLD server will point to the corresponding authoritative name server, and finally, that last server can answer the DNS query.

You can see that there are many stops that a DNS query makes.

Does DNS service affect SEO, and how?

There are several ways how DNS could affect SEO results. Some are obvious, and others are not so clear. Let’s explore them one by one.

Site loading speed

The DNS is the first process that happens before a website gets loaded inside the visitors’ browser. As we already mentioned, the DNS resolution process is a long process that will add up to the total time that the visitor experience. There is a bit difference between an average of 20 milliseconds with a good DNS provider from all around the world or 200 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds leaving everything to the domain registrar.

Availability

Experiencing DNS outages often and for a long time most definitely affect your site SEO negatively. If a search bot tries to reach your site and it can’t do it, it will report this event. First, it won’t be able to index newly added pages quickly. Second, it will take a note about general availability that could worsen your site’s position.

DNS providers have multiple features to provide excellent DNS availability that includes: providing multiple name servers, Anycast that uses a single IP address for all of them, DDoS protection, DNS monitor, DNS Failover, and more.

Multiple locations

A DNS provider can offer you multiple points of presence (PoPs) that you can use and set name servers. It will significantly increase the speed for the visitors by shortening the route from them to the name servers. At CLouDNS we have one of the best Anycast DNS networks with 60+ PoPs located on 6 continents. All of our Premium DNS, DDoS Protected DNS and GeoDNS plans include Anycast DNS as well as many more, such as DNSSEC, DNS Failover, Reverse DNS, etc.

DNS migration

If the DNS migration is performed correctly and the proper measures were taken, there should be no feelable difference for the users nor the search engines’ bots. The problem occurs only if the TTL values of the previous DNS records are too high, and those DNS records won’t be deleted from the DNS caches of recursive name servers for long. Until the caches get updates, they will still point to the older address, resulting in downtime.

Changing of the IP address

If you have to change the IP address of your site, this should not negatively impact SEO as long as it is managed properly. Ensure that the transition is seamless by updating DNS records and monitoring performance to maintain high availability and user experience.

Which is the best DNS for me?

Optimizing DNS for SEO

Choosing a Fast DNS Provider

Selecting a reliable and fast DNS provider is crucial for improving your site’s DNS resolution time. Providers with optimized global networks and high response speeds can significantly reduce latency, ensuring faster and more consistent access for users. ClouDNS is a standout option, offering a robust global Anycast network with DDoS-protected DNS servers, DNSSEC for enhanced security, and flexible options like Secondary DNS, making it an ideal choice for high-performance, secure, and SEO-friendly DNS management.

Setting Up CDN and DNS Configuration

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be used in conjunction with DNS to improve your site’s loading speed. CDNs store cached versions of your site’s content on servers around the world. By integrating a CDN with your DNS provider, users can load your content from the server closest to them, reducing load times and improving SEO.

How to create your own CDN using DNS

Implementing DNS Prefetching

DNS prefetching is a browser feature that helps pre-resolve domain names that users are likely to click next. By adding the <link rel=”dns-prefetch” href=”//example.com”> tag, you instruct browsers to look up the DNS information for that domain before the user even clicks it, reducing potential latency.

Tip: Use DNS prefetching for external resources on your site, such as analytics, social media, and third-party widgets, to reduce delays.

DNS and International SEO

For websites with international audiences and global services, DNS configuration can impact international SEO strategies. Utilizing country-specific domains (ccTLDs) or regional subdomains helps search engines identify your target audiences. However, misconfigurations can lead to incorrect geotargeting, hurting your rankings in specific regions.

Tip: Use Google Search Console’s geotargeting settings and configure DNS properly to avoid conflicting signals.

Conclusion

In conclusion, DNS plays a pivotal role in enhancing SEO by directly impacting site speed, availability, and overall user experience. With optimized DNS settings, including faster DNS resolution, multiple locations, and proper IP address management, you’re not only improving user satisfaction but also signaling quality to search engines. Investing in a reliable DNS provider ensures smoother site operation and helps your site perform well across global search rankings. To truly benefit from your DNS setup, stay proactive about performance monitoring and consider advanced configurations like DNS prefetching and CDN integration.

The post DNS and SEO: How does DNS service affect SEO? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

What is an HTTP flood attack?

An HTTP flood attack is a form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack specifically targeting web servers. In this malicious assault, the attacker overwhelms a web server with an enormous volume of HTTP requests, rendering it incapable of handling legitimate user requests. This tactic capitalizes on the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol, allowing for easy forging and amplification of requests. Such attacks can come from a single source or be distributed across multiple locations, making them harder to trace and block. The simplicity of executing these attacks makes them a popular tool among cybercriminals looking to disrupt online services.

How does it work?

Step 1: Request Amplification

HTTP flood attacks exploit the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol, enabling attackers to forge a vast number of seemingly legitimate requests. These requests are often designed to consume server resources disproportionately.

Step 2: Botnet Deployment

Perpetrators commonly utilize botnets, networks of compromised computers, to amplify the scale and impact of the attack. This distributed approach makes it challenging to trace and mitigate the source of the assault.

Step 3: Targeting Specific Vulnerabilities

HTTP flood attacks may exploit vulnerabilities in web server software, operating systems, or specific applications. By pinpointing weaknesses, attackers maximize the efficacy of their assault.

Types of HTTP flood attacks

In the realm of HTTP flood attacks, adversaries deploy a variety of tactics to overwhelm web servers, each with its own distinctive approach.

• GET Floods: GET Floods are a type of HTTP flood attack that targets the HTTP GET method used in web communication. Attackers send a massive number of GET requests to a web server, designed to look like legitimate user interactions, with the aim of overwhelming the server’s resources and capacity to respond. Imagine your website is a popular restaurant, and suddenly, an overwhelming number of customers flood in, each asking for the menu without any intention of placing an order. GET floods operate similarly, bombarding the server with a surge of requests for information, causing chaos and resource exhaustion.

• POST Floods:  POST Floods focus on the HTTP POST method, which is used for sending data to a server. In these attacks, cybercriminals flood the server with numerous POST requests, often containing seemingly valid data submissions. This flood of requests can strain the server’s CPU and memory resources, causing delayed responses or service disruptions. Picture customers storming in and placing orders at an unprecedented rate, without any regard for the kitchen’s capacity. POST floods emulate this scenario by inundating the server with an excessive number of data-submission requests, pushing the server to its limits and potentially causing it to stumble.

Impact of HTTP flood attack

Picture your website as a bustling city during rush hour and an HTTP flood attack as an unexpected surge in traffic causing digital gridlock. This online congestion not only disrupts normal operations but also leads to inevitable downtime and service interruptions as the server contends with an overwhelming influx of requests.

• Downtime and Service Disruption. Think of your website as a bustling city with countless residents seeking information. An HTTP flood attack is like an unexpected traffic jam, bringing the entire city to a standstill. Downtime and service disruption become inevitable as the server struggles to handle the overwhelming surge of requests.
  Suggested article: Understanding the HTTP status codes

• Financial Loss. Just as a shop loses revenue when forced to close unexpectedly, businesses hit by an HTTP flood attack experience financial setbacks. The loss isn’t just in terms of immediate revenue; it’s also about potential future earnings as user trust takes a hit.
• Reputational Damage. Consider the impact on a brand when its flagship store experiences a sudden closure. Similarly, successful HTTP flood attacks can tarnish a website’s reputation, eroding the hard-earned trust of users. Reputational damage extends beyond the immediate attack, affecting long-term relationships with customers.

5 Signs your website is under HTTP flood attack

Early detection of an HTTP flood attack is crucial for effective response. Here are technical indicators that may signal such an attack:

1. Increased HTTP Request Rates: If your web server logs show a sudden and sustained increase in HTTP GET or POST requests, especially from a range of unusual IP addresses, this could indicate an attack. Monitoring tools can be configured to alert administrators to spikes that exceed baseline levels.
2. Increased CPU and Memory Usage: HTTP flood attacks force the server to handle a massive number of requests, leading to unusual CPU and memory consumption. If your server resources are maxing out unexpectedly, this might be a sign of a flood attack.
3. Slow or Non-Responsive Website: A significant HTTP flood attack can slow down your website or make it entirely unresponsive, as the server struggles to handle the load. If your site becomes inaccessible or experiences frequent timeouts, it may be under attack.
4. Log Files Full of Repetitive Requests: When reviewing server logs, you may notice a large volume of similar requests, often with the same IP range, user agent, or request URL. This repetitive pattern is a hallmark of HTTP flood attacks, as attackers often send requests in bursts.
5. Increased Bounce Rate Without Clear Cause: When legitimate users experience a slow or non-responsive website due to an attack, they are more likely to leave. If you see a sudden increase in bounce rate without an obvious reason, an HTTP flood attack may be the culprit.

Preventive measures against HTTP flood attack

Detecting an HTTP flood attack is akin to being the vigilant lifeguard at a crowded beach.

Monitoring service

Just as a lifeguard watches the ocean for irregularities, detecting HTTP flood attacks involves monitoring for abnormal spikes in web traffic. An unexpected surge signals trouble, prompting a swift response to ensure the safety of the online “beach.” With HTTP/HTTPS Monitoring service you will be able to keep track of the performance and availability of websites, web applications, and web services.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)

Think of WAFs as the vigilant eye of the lifeguard tower, surveying the digital sea. These firewalls analyze incoming traffic, identifying and blocking any suspicious activity, acting as a proactive defense against potential threats.

DDoS Mitigation Services

There are services specifically designed to protect against DDoS attacks, including HTTP Floods. DDoD Protection services work by diverting traffic through their networks first, filtering out the bad traffic, and only sending the good traffic to your server.

Implement Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

CDNs distribute your content across multiple, geographically diverse servers, so it’s closer to your users. This not only speeds up content delivery but also means that traffic is spread out and not directed at a single server, making it harder for an HTTP Flood to have an impact. In addition, at ClouDNS you can build your own CDN with our GeoDNS service. With it you can be one layer protected against these malicious attacks. 

How to create your own CDN using DNS

Creating Redundancies

Have a backup plan, or in technical terms, create redundancies. If one server or network component fails under the load, others can take over. This is like having backup generators ready in case the main power supply goes out.

Conclusion

Though HTTP flood attacks present a real and present danger to web servers, the good news is that they are not insurmountable. By staying vigilant, employing a layered security approach, and embracing both reactive and proactive defense strategies, businesses can effectively dampen the impact of these attacks. Ensuring your website’s resilience in the digital ecosystem is key, allowing you to maintain seamless operations and safeguard your digital assets against such disruptive forces.

The post HTTP flood attack – What is it and How to prevent it? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Load Balancing – Definition

The network performance has become incredibly important. No matter if your organization is big or small, you don’t want to experience operational issues or network reliability problems. Load Balancing manages the demand by distributing the traffic and the application load over different servers depending on their current load.

It is not a new invention. In its early days, it was used between the end device and the application servers to check the servers and to send traffic to the least occupied.

But with the evolving of the networks, load balancing has gotten a new shape. Now it is not a simple distribution system. The load balancing has become very divided.

Here are some Load Balancing examples:

• There is application load balancer which distributes one single application over the servers; there is another which distributes only between the server cluster; another directs the traffic from multiple paths to a single destination.
• Other load balancing solutions are very advanced. They can shape the traffic and act as intelligent traffic switches, do different health checks on the content, applications, and servers, add extra security on the network and protect it from malicious software and improve availability.

Choosing load balancing is hard. You need to think about the demands on your networks and servers. You need 100% reliability on every part. If one component fails, this can lead to downtime.

Why Do You Need Load Balancing?

Load balancing is crucial for optimizing the performance, reliability, and scalability of your online services. Without it, a single server could become a bottleneck, causing downtime or even crashes during periods of high traffic. Load balancing helps distribute traffic efficiently across multiple servers, reducing the risk of server overloads and ensuring uninterrupted service. It also enhances user experience by providing faster response times and higher availability. Furthermore, load balancers help protect your infrastructure against DDoS attacks by distributing malicious traffic across multiple servers. It is particularly important for businesses with high traffic volumes or mission-critical services, as it can help maintain uptime and performance consistency. Another significant reason for adopting this mechanism is its scalability. As your website grows, adding more servers is a standard solution to manage the increased traffic load. Load balancing enables this growth by ensuring that new servers are smoothly integrated into your system without affecting overall performance.

How does it work?

Load balancing is achieved and managed with a tool or application that is called a load balancer. Despite the form of the load balancer (hardware or software), its main goal is to spread the network traffic among different servers and prevent overloading. 

Here are several steps which explain how load balancing works:

1. Your website receives traffic. Once users reach your website, they send a lot of requests to your server at the same time. 
2. The traffic is spread toward the server resources. The load balancer (hardware or software) intercepts and examines every request. Then, it directs it to the most suitable server node.
3. Every server works with a reasonable workload. The server node receives the request. When it is able to accept it, the server notifies the load balancer that it is not overloaded with too many requests.
4. The server answers the request. In order to complete the process, the server sends the response back to the user.

Whenever a user request arrives, the load balancer directs it to a precise server. The process repeats for every request. Load balancers are responsible for deciding which server is going to receive a precise request. That is determined based on different techniques for load balancing.

Types of Load Balancing

There are three appliances of Load Balancing – Physical, Virtual and Cloud-based.

Physical Appliance

This is the most traditional approach. The load balancer is placed right after the firewall and before the server cluster. Now you can expect the balancer to include more advanced functions like a built-in firewall and to be the all-in-one gatekeeper of the network.

There are other subtypes to the Physical. Some load balancers serve as caching devices, others like SSL accelerators or ADCs.

They are all physically present in the same data center as the application servers. The benefits that they provide are easy controlled and easy to connect and form bigger structures.

The negative part is that they are costly, you need to buy a lot of hardware and software to control them and lack geographical distribution.

Virtual Appliance

In the previous appliance, the main accent was put on hardware; here we don’t have a specific hardware. It runs on a virtual machine. This virtual machine provides the environment where the load balancing software works. It is a lot easier to apply because it can run on different computer configurations. It is cheap as well, and you can buy less expensive servers; the focus goes on the software, not on the hardware; it is easier to back up.

As for disadvantages, we can mention the problem with choosing a virtualization platform, and patches and upgrades can sometimes hurt the system.

Cloud-based Load Balancing

This is a convenient and robust solution for bigger networks. It is based on the cloud, and there it handles the load balancing and other functions like failover.

It manages interruptions, network problems, and outages far better and it can easily redistribute the traffic. Some other benefits of using Cloud-based Load Balancing are:

• Speed – it significantly reduces the response times and reduces the load on applications and web servers.
• Security – at load balancer level, DDoS attacks can be blocked and prevented.
• Low starting cost – you don’t need to buy software, nor expensive hardware. It is a service that you choose based on your current needs, and it is easily upgradable.

If you want to manage your DNS traffic (DNS requests) more efficiently, you can implement Load balancing in one of the following ways:

• Round Robin DNS

Round Robin DNS is a technique of load distribution, load balancing, or fault-tolerance provisioning multiple, redundant Internet Protocol service hosts (e.g. Web server, FTP servers), by managing the Domain Name System’s (DNS) responses to address requests from client computers according to an appropriate statistical model.

Round Robin DNS is often used to load balance requests between a number of Web servers. You can find more information regarding Round Robin DNS and how to use it here.

• GeoDNS

The GeoDNS service allows you to redirect your customers to specific IPs (servers) based on their geographic location. The service allows you to build your own CDN or to load balance your traffic. It is more accurate and smart than the Round-Robin. You can also set up different websites for each geolocation region. You can find detailed information regarding GeoDNS here.

Load Balancing Benefits

Load balancing is all about improving the management of network traffic and making the user experience better. Therefore, the benefits it provides are the following:

• Scalability: If you notice a drop or spikes in your traffic, you can easily increase or decrease the number of your servers to satisfy urgent requirements. That way, you can handle sudden massive amounts of requests. They usually appear, for instance, during a promotion or holiday sales.
• Redundancy: When you have the ability to maintain your website on multiple servers, you can ensure excellent uptime. Relying only on one web server hides a lot of risks that will force your visitors to leave your website. Load balancing is key if you can’t afford downtime.
• Flexibility: Load balancing gives you the ability to redirect traffic from one server to another. So that way, you have the flexibility to perform your regular maintenance work without disturbing the normal operations of your website.
• Avoid failures: Load balancing can be very helpful for avoiding failures. It spreads large amounts of traffic to the available servers and prevents outages. You can manage the servers efficiently and precisely. It is best if they are distributed across several data centers.
• DDoS attack protection: Spreading traffic across servers is also valuable when protecting against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Load balancing helps when a particular server gets flooded with malicious traffic by a DDoS attack. The traffic is forwarded to many servers rather than just one, and the attack surface is reduced. This way, load balancing eliminates single points of failure, and your network is resilient against such attacks.

Who can benefit from load balancing?

Here are the organizations and sectors that can benefit significantly from load balancing:

• Websites and E-commerce: Websites with high traffic, online retailers, and e-commerce platforms benefit from load balancing to ensure fast page loading, minimal downtime, and a seamless user experience.
• Cloud Service Providers: Companies offering cloud-based services rely on this technique to distribute workloads across servers, ensuring scalability and fault tolerance for their customers.
• Enterprises: Large enterprises use load balancing to evenly distribute network traffic across servers, preventing overloads, optimizing resource utilization, and maintaining system stability.
• Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): CDNs use the mechanism to efficiently deliver content to users, reducing latency and improving the delivery of multimedia, software updates, and web content.
• Gaming Industry: Online gaming companies utilize it to handle multiplayer game traffic, reduce lag, maintain game responsiveness, and ensure a smooth gaming experience.
• Healthcare and Telecommunications: Critical sectors like healthcare and telecom rely on load balancing for fault tolerance and high availability, ensuring that vital services remain accessible even during peak loads or server failures.
• Internet Service Providers (ISPs): ISPs can optimize network traffic, improving internet connectivity for their customers and efficiently managing the load.
• Government and Educational Institutions: These organizations employ load balancing to handle high volumes of traffic on their websites and online resources, ensuring accessibility and reliability.

Best Practices

When implementing the load balancing mechanism, it is important to follow the best practices, which are the following:

• Implement Health Checks

Always use health checks to monitor the status of your servers. Regular monitoring ensures that traffic is routed only to functioning servers, preventing requests from being sent to unresponsive or slow servers, which can negatively affect the user experience. Health checks allow your load balancer to automatically exclude problem servers and reintroduce them once they are back online.

• Select the Right Type of Load Balancer

Choosing the appropriate load balancer for your needs is key. Hardware, software, and cloud-based load balancers each offer different advantages. For small businesses, a cloud-based load balancer can offer flexibility and scalability, while enterprises with complex needs may benefit from physical or hybrid solutions. Consider your traffic type, load, and future growth when making a decision.

• Prioritize Redundancy and Failover Plans

Always ensure you have redundancy built into your load balancing setup. A backup or failover load balancer should be in place to take over in case the primary one fails. This ensures that traffic continues to flow smoothly even during server or network outages, thereby maintaining high availability for your users.

• Enhance Security

Load balancers are a frontline defense against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious traffic. By distributing traffic, they prevent bottlenecks that attackers aim to exploit. Implement DDoS protection strategies alongside load balancing, such as limiting excessive connections from a single source and setting up rate-limiting rules.

• Leverage Geo-based Load Balancing

For global businesses, using geo-based load balancing can significantly improve the user experience. This strategy directs users to the server closest to their geographic location, reducing latency and speeding up content delivery. By leveraging GeoDNS, businesses can ensure that customers experience fast, reliable service no matter where they are located.

• Monitor and Optimize Regularly

After setting up load balancing, ongoing monitoring and optimization are crucial to maintaining performance. Regularly assess traffic patterns, response times, and server health to ensure the configuration continues to meet your needs. Make adjustments as your infrastructure or traffic load changes to keep everything running smoothly.

Conclusion

As always you should know the needs of your organization to choose how exactly to implement the load balancing. Based on the advantages we recommend to start with a Cloud-based Load Balancing. You can sign up for free to use Round Robin DNS or if you want to use the more advanced GeoDNS service, you can find details about prices and features on our website.

The post What is Load Balancing? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Domain Name System explained

The Domain Name System, or simply for short, DNS, is a decentralized and hierarchically organized naming system that serves to translate human-understandable domain names into machines understanding IP addresses. It is one of the foundations of the global network – the Internet.

The process is performed completely in the background, and regular users don’t even notice it. However, every time a user writes a domain name in its browser address bar, a DNS query is initiated, and a search for the corresponding IP address is triggered. A Recursive DNS server is the one responsible for seeking the information. It has to query the root server, TLD (Top-Level Domain) server, and the Authoritative DNS server of the precise domain name until the requested information is found. Once that is complete, the Recursive DNS server gets back to the browser, and it can connect and load the desired website. 

Without the Domain Name System (DNS), the process would be way more complex and slow. Users would have to remember each website’s IP address in order to connect to it successfully. You can imagine how difficult that would be. IP addresses are long strings of numbers that machines and servers use to communicate with each other, yet for us humans, domain names are the more suitable and easy-to-understand option. That is why the development of the Domain Name System (DNS) has improved the usage of the Internet numerous times! 

When it comes to choosing the best DNS service for your business, you should be aware of the different available alternatives, so your domain performs just the way you desire. 

Which is the best DNS for me?

The best DNS is the one that suits your domain name needs the most. Some businesses with an online presence require more, for instance, large e-commerce websites, and others, like small personal blogs, don’t need as many resources and features. The best DNS service is, in most cases, the key to excellent performance, fast and reliable DNS resolution, great uptime, improved security, and many more. The trick is to understand which is the best DNS for precise needs and, after that, to implement it! 

So now, let’s explain a little bit more about the different DNS services that are available and how they can benefit your company, also which of them are most suitable depending on the scale and requirements! 

Free DNS

Free DNS is the best DNS for small start-ups, personal blogs, and other businesses that do not require a lot of resources. The amount of monthly DNS queries is not so massive, and the traffic demand is low. It is amazing for anyone that is just starting their journey with 

Free DNS service gives your domain name the ability to be visible on the Internet. It provides a simple and basic DNS infrastructure that gives the opportunity to your users to access and explore your website.

You can create, modify and delete different DNS records, like A record, AAAA record, MX record, and more. Additionally, this service is very beneficial if you want to implement Dynamic DNS.

Everybody needs a starting point. Free DNS could help you boost your business and get ready for the next step.

Premium DNS

Premium DNS offers amazing advanced features and is the best DNS solution for any sized website. However, small and medium businesses with an online presence mostly prefer this DNS service. The great thing about it is that it offers scalability thanks to the different Premium DNS plans. That means you can quickly adapt to any situation. For example, if your traffic demands become higher, you can go one level up and get a larger plan.

Premium DNS is offering more of everything. You can take advantage of the increased number of DNS servers and DNS zones and guarantee the most optimal traffic management of your domain name. In addition, you will have access to more advanced features like Anycast DNS, Secondary DNS, DNSSEC, DNS Failover, Reverse DNS, and more. As a positive result, you will receive better uptime, improved security, and an improvement in the loading speed.

These plans are a perfect opportunity for any type of website that has more than a few monthly visitors. Organizations that especially are not able to experience any downtime should implement a professional Premium DNS plan.

DDoS Protected DNS 

DDoS Protected DNS is the best DNS solution for everyone that wants to enhance their security and prepare if any incoming threats appear toward their DNS. This service is going to guarantee excellent performance of the domain name even in case a DDoS attack is initiated. 

The additional DNS service combines various tools and techniques to examine the traffic and prevent DDoS attacks. Cybercriminals initiate DDoS attacks by forming massive amounts of malicious traffic. Their main goal is to overwhelm the servers of their victim. As a result, the service or website of the victim becomes unable to function, which means it is also not capable of answering the DNS requests of regular users. When that happens, the victim experiences financial and reputational losses.

As we mentioned, the best DNS, in that case, is a DDoS Protected DNS service, which will resist and stop these cyber threats from happening by load balancing through DNS servers, filtering, Monitoring, and DNS Failover. It is a preventive solution that is more affordable rather than dealing with the after-effects of a DDoS attack.

GeoDNS

GeoDNS is the best DNS choice for organizations with a global presence and for companies that provide content worldwide and want to build their custom CDN (Content Delivery Network). The name servers are positioned strategically in numerous locations (regions, countries, continents) all over the world, which totally meets the requirements of these large companies.

GeoDNS (Geographical Domain Name System) involves a traffic distribution process that depends on the location of the DNS requests. 

As you know, the complex process of DNS resolution is triggered when a user requests a precise domain. It should be quick and served successfully just for a few seconds. Using GeoDNS, the Recursive DNS server responsible for finding the needed information reads the user’s IP address to understand its location. Once it understands from where the request is made, it will be sent to the nearest server for the answer.  

The main difference between a standard DNS service and GeoDNS is that the standard DNS servers hold the same IP address for the domain. But, on the other hand, with GeoDNS, the servers hold different IP addresses based on the location. That is the way it boosts the speed and improves performance!

Factors to consider when choosing DNS

When deciding on the best DNS service for your business, consider these important factors:

Traffic Volume:

Begin by evaluating the volume of traffic your website receives regularly. High-traffic websites may benefit from DNS services like Premium DNS, DDoS Protected DNS or GeoDNS, which can ensure swift and responsive performance even during traffic spikes.

Security Needs:

Consider the nature of your business and whether you handle sensitive data. If security is a top priority or if your industry is susceptible to cyber threats, DNS services such as DDoS Protected DNS will provide an added layer of security to protect your online assets.

Scalability:

It’s vital to choose a DNS solution that can scale as your business grows. Premium DNS services offer scalability features that allow you to accommodate increasing levels of traffic and ensure a seamless user experience

Geographical Reach:

If your business operates on a global scale, consider DNS services like GeoDNS that optimize website performance by directing users to the nearest server. This is particularly valuable for companies with an international audience.

Technical Support:

Technical support is a crucial aspect to consider. All of our ClouDNS services reinforce live chat technical support. This is invaluable in addressing issues, resolving challenges, and maintaining the smooth operation of your DNS infrastructure.

Best DNS for Specific Needs

When selecting the best DNS service for your business, it’s essential to align the DNS solution with your unique needs. Not all businesses operate the same way, and choosing a DNS service that fits your specific requirements can greatly enhance your website’s performance, security, and reliability. Below are some tailored recommendations based on common business needs:

• Best DNS for High-Traffic Websites

If your business experiences a large volume of traffic, such as a popular e-commerce site or a news platform, you’ll need a DNS solution that can handle high demand without compromising performance. Premium DNS is a great choice in this scenario. It provides enhanced speed, uptime, and reliability by distributing traffic across multiple servers and offering advanced features like Anycast DNS and DNS Failover. Additionally, GeoDNS can be beneficial for global websites, ensuring users are directed to the nearest server, reducing latency and improving user experience.

• Best DNS for Security-Focused Businesses

For industries that handle sensitive data, such as finance, healthcare, or online transactions, DNS security is a top priority. In these cases, DDoS Protected DNS is a must-have. This service protects your website against DDoS attacks, ensuring that your domain remains accessible even under heavy malicious traffic. Combined with DNSSEC, which adds an additional layer of security by authenticating DNS responses, you can protect your users and data from various cyber threats.

• Best DNS for Startups and Small Businesses

If you’re just starting out with a smaller website or personal blog, Free DNS can serve as a solid foundation. It offers basic DNS functionality that allows your domain to be reachable on the Internet. Free DNS is ideal for businesses that do not yet require the full range of features offered by Premium DNS, such as more DNS zones and various DNS records. Once your website begins to grow, you can easily scale up to a Premium DNS plan when needed.

• Best DNS for Global Businesses

If your business has an international audience or operates globally, GeoDNS is the best choice. It optimizes performance by routing user requests to the closest server based on their geographic location, resulting in faster load times and improved user experience. This type of DNS is particularly useful for companies providing content, media, or services worldwide and helps ensure seamless access from any region.

• Best DNS for Downtime-Sensitive Websites

Some businesses cannot afford downtime, even for a few minutes. For critical services such as online banking, cloud platforms, or SaaS products, uptime is crucial. In these cases, Premium DNS with features like DNS Failover is the best option. This ensures that if one server fails, another one takes over, minimizing any potential disruptions and keeping your site available 24/7.

Conclusion

As you now understand, there is no universal solution for the best DNS. There are many factors that should be considered, and depending on your website’s needs, only you can make the decision and choose the most suitable option for you.

The post How to choose the best DNS for my business? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Why do we need load balancing?

With the massive increase of the internet traffic each year, it is getting harder to provide a sustainable service for all the millions of clients without having some downtime. For this purpose, you need to apply a model of load balancing, that will reduce the load caused by the countless users trying to reach your website or use your application.

Another reason why you need to use load balancing is the rising number of DDoS attacks. To evade them you will need to spread the traffic to as many as possible servers that you have. That way, their combined efforts can resist the wave of high traffic.

DNS load balancing explained

DNS load balancing is a technique that distributes incoming web traffic across several DNS servers by associating a single domain name with multiple IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6). When users request the domain, DNS servers provide different IP addresses in a DNS Round-Robin fashion or based on other algorithms that help effectively spread the load. That way, traffic is distributed across multiple servers, preventing any single server from becoming overwhelmed and maintaining overall service availability.

Pros of DNS load balancing

Some of the main benefits of DNS load balancing include the following:

• Easy to Implement: It doesn’t require specialized hardware and can be implemented by only configuring DNS records. That makes it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes.
• Geographic Distribution: It can also be utilized to direct users to servers in different geographic locations. As a result, it improves performance by reducing latency for users located at different points all over the world.
• Scalability: Adding or removing servers from the load balancing pool is a relatively easy and simple process. That makes it suitable for applications that experience changing levels of traffic.

Cons of DNS load balancing

Here are several things you should consider before implementing this technique:

• TTL Impact: DNS records have a Time-to-Live (TTL) value, which determines how long a DNS response is cached. Changing load balancing configurations might take time to propagate due to the caching mechanism.
• Limited Monitoring: It lacks real-time awareness of server health. If a server becomes unavailable, DNS will still route traffic to it until the DNS cache expires. To avoid that, you can implement a Monitoring service to help identify potential issues quickly.

Hardware load balancer (HLB)

HLBs are the first to appear sometime in the late 90s. They are hardware, which means you need to purchase the device and connect it to your network. Hardware load balancing (HLB) distributes traffic across multiple servers depending on the servers’ process power, the connections, usage of resources or randomly.

The hardware load balancers are implemented on Layer4 (Transport layer) and Layer7 (Application layer). On Layer4 it makes use of TCP, UDP and SCTP transport layer protocol details to make decision on which server the data is to be sent.

Suggested article: Comprehensive Guide on TCP Monitoring vs. UDP Monitoring

On Layer7, the hardware forms an ADN (Application delivery network) and passes on requests to the servers as per the type of the content.

Pros of Hardware load balancing

Here are the primary benefits of Hardware load balancing:

• Advanced Features: Hardware load balancers can perform complex traffic distribution algorithms, considering factors like server health, response times, and content-based routing, leading to more efficient traffic distribution.
• Real-Time Monitoring: These devices continuously monitor server health and network conditions, enabling immediate traffic redirection in case of server failures or high loads.
• Enhanced Scalability: Hardware load balancers can handle large amounts of traffic and provide seamless scalability for growing services.

Cons of Hardware load balancing

Some of the drawbacks or things you should have in mind when choosing this method for load balancing are the following:

• Cost and Complexity: Implementing hardware load balancing requires a significant investment in specialized hardware devices and ongoing maintenance, which might be a barrier for small to medium-sized businesses. Configuration and management can be complex, especially for organizations without specialized networking experts.
• Single Point of Failure: While hardware load balancers enhance server availability, they themselves can become single points of failure. Proper advanced configuration is often necessary to mitigate this risk.

DNS load balancing vs. Hardware load balancing

We will compare them in two conditions, with a single data center, and with cross data center load balancing.

In the first scenario, both are very competitive. The main difference is in price. The DNS load balancer can be more accessible because usually it is offered as a subscription. In the case of HLB you must buy it and if you need extra power in the future, the upgrades can come very costly. The DNS service can be scaled easier, just by updating to another plan.

In the second scenario with cross data center, things are similar. It is getting very expensive to create a global server load balancing with the HLB because you need to properly equip every of your data center.

With global in mind, the DNS load balancing has a clear advantage over the HLB with scalability and price. The DNS option has a better failover and easy recovery.
Another advantage of the DNS load balancing is the cost to maintain. The DNS services are mostly offered as Managed DNS, so it requires less maintenance.

Which One to Choose?

Choosing between DNS load balancing and hardware load balancing largely depends on the specific needs and resources of your business.

DNS load balancing is generally more cost-effective and easier to implement, making it ideal for small to medium-sized businesses or those with inconsistent traffic levels. Its scalability and ability to direct traffic based on geographic location provide a significant advantage for globally distributed user bases. However, it’s important to consider the limitations, such as the impact of TTL on configuration changes and the lack of real-time server health monitoring, which can actually be compensated by implementing ClouDNS’s monitoring service. Despite these drawbacks, DNS load balancing offers a flexible and affordable solution for many online services.

On the other hand, hardware load balancing is better suited for enterprises requiring advanced features and robust real-time monitoring capabilities. The hardware solution offers more sophisticated traffic distribution algorithms, taking into account server health and network conditions to optimize performance. Although the initial investment and complexity in setup and maintenance are higher, hardware load balancers provide enhanced scalability and reliability for handling large volumes of traffic. They are particularly beneficial for applications requiring high availability and minimal latency.

Finally, your decision should consider the cost, desired level of control, and specific performance requirements to ensure a seamless and efficient online experience for your users.

Conclusion

Both DNS load balancing and hardware load balancing offer a good solution for distributing traffic. Which one to choose depends on the needs of your company. How tight control you would like to have? How much can you invest? Do you like a subscription model with small monthly fees or do you prefer to put a lot of money every few years to have top of the notch performance?

We recommend you to try a DNS cloud-based load balancing, like our GeoDNS.
It is cost-effective, easily scalable; you can use multiple geolocation target options and have protection from DDoS attacks.

Later you can combine it with your own hardware load balancing and create a hybrid for your specific needs.

The post DNS load balancing vs. Hardware load balancing appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Here we will show you some good practices to manage your DNS. Prevention is the best defense. Pay attention to these pieces of advice and take action.

Hide the master DNS

Configure the master DNS as a hidden. Like this, it will not be shown in the records of the name server. It will not appear, and it will not respond to any queries. Its purpose will be to give zone transfers to secondary name servers which will be public but doing it safely and hidden.

Secured Access

Make the connection between the master DNS and the secondary name servers secured. Use ACLs (access control lists) and TSIGs (Transaction signatures). Like this, your secondary servers won’t be fooled, and your network won’t get corrupted.

Disable recursion

Do this on the external servers and reduce the risk for your authoritative servers to be part of DNS attacks like DNS Amplification.

Add rate limits

Even if you disabled the recursion on your authoritative DNS servers, they still could be used in DNS Amplification attacks with your domain names. To mitigate the options of the DNS attackers, you can add rate limits. If you are using bind software, here is an example configuration you can add to the options clause to set rate limit from 2 queries per second on average for each IPv4 class C (/24) network:

rate-limit {
responses-per-second 2;
ipv4-prefix-length 24;
slip 1;
};

Don’t show all information

The information about the version of your DNS software is for you. Don’t make it public. If hackers know it, they can use it against you by exploiting the particular vulnerabilities that the software might have. For example, if you are using bind software you can add a version in the options clause like this:

version “unknown”;

Place content (web) servers where your customers are

Be smart and think about your users. Place name servers where your clients need them the most. It will reduce the latency and improve the experience for your users. It will also minimize the load on your other servers, give you extra protection, and it will reduce the chance of failure. If you have multiple target markets in different locations (for example EU and the US), you can use GeoDNS service to direct the customers to the right servers which are closer to them.

Anycast DNS

Use Anycast DNS for your business. This will make the experience for your users, faster and better. It will dramatically reduce the time to load the first page of your website, which helps your SEO significantly. It makes it more resilient, making it harder to experience a down time and more protected from DDoS attacks because of the different points of presence.

Use DNSSEC

Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) provide an additional layer of security on top of your DNS. This DNS best practice prevents a certain kind of attack where the attacker intercepts and potentially alters the DNS queries and responses. DNSSEC ensures that the users are communicating with the intended website or service, and not a malicious version of it. However, it’s important to note that DNSSEC can be complex to implement and manage and should be thoroughly tested before deployment.

Monitor DNS traffic

Keep an eye on your DNS traffic. Unusual patterns or a sudden increase in DNS queries could signal a security breach or a DDoS attack. By leveraging monitoring services and implementing alert systems, organizations can quickly identify and mitigate any unusual DNS activity, minimizing the impact of potential threats.

Control the traffic with DNS filtering

An excellent defence against viruses, spyware, and other malicious traffic is to block it before it can infiltrate your network. That’s where DNS filtering comes in. This technique control and restrict access to specific websites or content based on DNS queries. By implementing it, organizations can proactively prevent access to malicious or inappropriate websites, reducing the risk of malware infections, data breaches, and other cyber threats.

Keep log files

Maintaining logs of DNS server activity is another crucial DNS practices for security incident response and forensic analysis. These logs provide valuable information about DNS queries and responses, allowing organizations to identify and investigate security incidents. By analyzing the logs, organizations can understand the nature of the incident, track the source of the attack, and take appropriate measures to mitigate the impact. Additionally, DNS logs help meet compliance requirements, facilitate audits, and optimize network performance.

Use Geographical DNS for Load Balancing

Implement Geographical DNS (GeoDNS) to optimize the distribution of user traffic based on geographic locations. By directing users to the nearest or least loaded server, GeoDNS reduces latency and enhances the user experience. This approach not only improves response times but also helps in managing traffic loads more efficiently across distributed networks. Additionally, GeoDNS can be configured for failover mechanisms, rerouting traffic seamlessly in case of server downtime, thereby increasing the reliability of services.

Regularly audit your DNS configuration

Regularly reviewing and auditing your DNS configuration can help you identify and fix any misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities. The audit should cover all aspects of the DNS setup, including checking for unnecessary open zones, ensuring correct IP address mapping, and validating DNS record settings.

Free DNS audit tool

Conclusion

These are some of the most recommended DNS practices. While there will be new threats, many of the DNS attacks happening these days can be evaded. No matter if your network is small or large, try to keep it safe and protected, by following our recommendations. Restrict access to some parts of the network, and remember that well-designed infrastructure is vital to your digital presence.

The post DNS best practices appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Explanation of Traffic Director 

Traffic director is a way to optimize and manage the traffic going to your domain by using geographical-based routing. Like this, your clients from Asia will get connected to your Asian servers; your European clients will connect to the closest servers they have in Europe and so on.
Traffic Director is a cloud-based implementation of Load Balancing (you can check our article on Load Balancing). It helps to improve the performance of your network. It can be incredibly useful for medium and large companies that need to deliver content to different parts of the world.

Some companies call this service traffic director, others Global Traffic Director (GTD) or GeoDNS director, but it is best known as GeoDNS, and that is why we use this term as the name of our service.

How does it perform?

Traffic Director gives you easy access to a powerful global load-balancing system by making configuration easy. All you need to do is set your own regional rules, and the Traffic Director will intelligently direct DNS queries through strategically-placed nameservers.

ClouDNS enables you to optimize your query traffic with custom regionalization, allowing you to divide traffic across six global regions:

• Africa
• Asia
• Europe
• North America
• Oceania
• South America

By leveraging Traffic Director, you can ensure your site visitors have a better experience. For example, through regionalized configurations, queries are redirected to the geographically closest nameservers, meaning Chicago visitors would be answered by a nameserver in the North American region rather than relying on a Asia or even overseas-based server.

In addition, If you want to ensure users from France, for example, receive the best possible experience, the Traffic Director can help you achieve this. Its regionalized configurations enable you to specify that all DNS queries from the country-based region (France) should be answered by a server located in Paris. This means you can ensure users are connected to the closest, most efficient nameserver. 

DNS lookups are the first step in making any DNS request. In order to produce the best user experience, DNS traffic must be routed efficiently and with purpose. If it is not handled optimally, it can lead to poor performance and contribute to a degraded user experience. By using a Traffic Director, you can ensure users get the speedy, reliable performance they deserve.

Typical DNS vs. Anycast vs. GeoDNS

Typically, you will have few DNS servers. A visitor trying to connect will ask at random one of them for your web server’s IP address. The visitor will be lucky if the server is close and not so happy if it is far away, but he or she will get the same IP address.
If you are using just an Anycast, multiple servers will respond to the same IP. With it, the visitor will get a response from the topologically closest nameserver. The reaction is quick, but it still can take time to connect to the web server if it is far away.
Here comes the GeoDNS/Traffic Director and its advantages. By using it, a visitor will get a different IP address, depending on his/her location. It will result in fast DNS query response and consequently fast connection to the web server.

Why should you get a Traffic Director/GeoDNS?

Multiple Geolocation target options

You can efficiently target regions, countries or whole continents. You can create an exact Geolocation load balancing. Filter your visitors and direct them to the servers which are closest.

Well-placed servers
We have located our servers close to high traffic international locations.

ClouDNS network is continuously growing. We have currently 50+ Anycast DNS locations on six continents for faster DNS query resolving.

DDoS Protected DNS
DDoS attacks are becoming a common threat. For your convenience and safety, our GeoDNS plans include DDoS Protection.
DDoS attacks and how to protect ourselves

Cost Effective
Although our plans include a limited amount of queries per month, we won’t charge you extra or temporarily stop your DNS if you get additional traffic in a month or two. If this trend continues for a more extended period, we will just propose a more suitable plan for your needs.

EDNS-client/subnet support
Our service makes decisions based on the real locations of the visitors, not on those of the DNS resolver.

SEO friendly
One of the most important factors of SEO is the speed. Thanks to the Network System of servers, the DNS queries will be resolved faster, and this will help you have higher SEO ranking.

Who can benefit from using Traffic Director?

Traffic Director, with its advanced load balancing and network traffic management capabilities, can provide significant advantages for a wide range of industries and sectors. Here are some key entities and scenarios where a Traffic Director can be highly beneficial:

• Large Enterprises and Corporations: Companies with large online operations, such as those in e-commerce, financial services, and digital media, can highly benefit from Traffic Director. It ensures that their websites and applications can handle massive traffic volumes efficiently, improving user experience and minimizing downtime during peak periods.
• Cloud Service Providers: Providers that offer cloud computing resources and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) can use Traffic Director to manage and distribute traffic across their data centers more effectively. That way, it enhances performance and reliability and optimizes resource utilization, leading to cost efficiency.
• Telecommunications Companies: Telecom operators can use a Traffic Director to manage the vast amounts of data passing through their networks. By efficiently routing traffic, they can enhance the quality of service for their subscribers and reduce the load on network infrastructure.
• Online Gaming and Entertainment: In industries where customer satisfaction is closely tied to the responsiveness and stability of the service, like online gaming, Traffic Director is a game-changer. It plays a crucial role in managing sudden spikes in traffic and maintaining a seamless user experience.
• Global Businesses: For businesses operating across multiple geographical locations, the Traffic Director helps implement global load balancing. That way, it ensures that users worldwide receive quick and reliable access to their services.

Conclusion

GeoDNS or Traffic Director as some call it can significantly improve your DNS network. Your visitors will be happy, connecting faster to your website and you can even deliver them different content depending on their location. GeoDNS is an excellent solution for media companies who need to provide high-quality content to different users from all around the world as fast as possible.

The post What is Traffic Director? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Every media company who wants to be international relies on CDN. Youtube, Amazon, Netflix and many more can’t provide equal service in so many different locations without it. It can deliver quality 4k video without buffering (if the visitors have quality internet too), thereby enhancing the viewer’s experience. The effectiveness of CDN technology in managing and distributing digital content has become a cornerstone for media companies aiming to achieve global reach and maintain high service quality.

The Essence of CDN in Modern Media

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, a system that delivers content all across the world. Imagine you have a media company that wants to show videos to different countries. You can’t have just your web hosting, because it will get all the traffic and it will get saturated. So much traffic that it can get down. And downtime means losses that you can’t afford. You need something to balance the load on an international level and that secures you 100% uptime so you wouldn’t have any angry customers.

This is where a CDN becomes invaluable, distributing your content through a network of servers located around the globe. This ensures that your content is served from the location nearest to the viewer, dramatically reducing latency and improving the overall viewing experience. Furthermore, CDNs are designed to handle spikes in traffic, ensuring that your media content remains available during peak times. This is particularly crucial for media companies, where even a slight delay can lead to a poor user experience and, ultimately, lost viewership or readership.

GeoDNS: Powering Next-Generation Content Delivery Networks

GeoDNS stands at the forefront of content delivery innovation, offering a streamlined alternative to traditional CDN mechanisms. By leveraging GeoDNS, media companies can build a highly responsive, globally distributed network that intelligently routes content based on the geographic location of the audience. This ensures that users receive data from the nearest server, minimizing latency and maximizing speed.

The sophistication of GeoDNS allows for dynamic content localization, enabling media to tailor experiences to specific markets with unprecedented precision. Furthermore, it facilitates efficient load balancing and traffic management across the network, enhancing overall system resilience and reliability. By adopting GeoDNS, media companies not only optimize their content delivery for speed and efficiency but also gain the flexibility to quickly adapt to changes in viewer demographics and consumption patterns.

Building a Resilient CDN Network with GeoDNS

The Strategic Advantage of GeoDNS for Media Companies

Cost and Efficiency: Creating a CDN through GeoDNS eliminates the need for expensive Anycast networks, making it an affordable solution for media organizations of all sizes. And once you start using the ClouDNS GeoDNS service, your visitors’ queries will pass through our DNS servers – each of which uses our Anycast DNS network, near your customers.

Enhanced User Experience: By serving content from geographically proximate servers, GeoDNS minimizes delays and buffering, crucial for maintaining viewer engagement and satisfaction.

Simplified Management: GeoDNS offers a straightforward way to manage global content delivery without the complexity and overhead associated with traditional CDN setups.

Furthermore, for streaming platforms, the imperative to deliver seamless, uninterrupted content is paramount. GeoDNS technology caters to this need by ensuring that video streams are efficiently routed to users from the optimal location. This not only elevates the viewing experience but also supports the platforms’ scalability as they expand into new markets.

Revolutionizing Streaming Services with GeoDNS

Expanding Global Reach While Maintaining Local Quality

One of the most significant challenges for media companies aiming to globalize their content is maintaining a consistent quality of service across diverse geographic regions. CDNs address this challenge by localizing content delivery. Regardless of the user’s location, CDNs provide a local presence that ensures content is delivered with the highest possible quality and the lowest possible latency, making global reach a realistic goal for media entities of all sizes. 

This localization strategy also allows for compliance with regional data regulations and content customization based on local preferences, further enhancing the user experience. By effectively shrinking the vast digital world into a tightly knit community of localized content delivery, CDNs enable media companies to create a universally high-quality experience that feels both global in reach and local in flavor.

Suggested to read: Global Reach, Local Touch: The Role of GeoDNS in eCommerce Expansion

CDN and SEO: A Synergistic Relationship

The benefits of CDN extend beyond just content delivery, impacting SEO rankings positively. Fast-loading pages and efficient content distribution are rewarded by search engines, highlighting the necessity of integrating CDN solutions into your digital strategy to enhance online visibility and performance. The relationship between CDN and SEO is symbiotic, with speed, reliability, and security contributing to better search rankings, while also enhancing the user experience. This synergy helps businesses to not only attract but also retain their online audience, providing a solid foundation for growth and success in the digital marketplace.

Conclusion

Leveraging GeoDNS as a CDN solution is crucial for ensuring fast, reliable, and globally scalable content delivery, enhancing both user experience and SEO performance in the competitive digital landscape. This approach not only streamlines access to digital media across diverse geographic regions but also fortifies the infrastructure against the challenges of scale and security. As the digital sphere continues to grow, the strategic implementation of GeoDNS as a CDN emerges as a pivotal asset for media companies aiming to excel in global content distribution.

The post Why media can’t live without CDN appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

What is CDN?

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of geographically distributed servers all around the world. Each of these servers is a PoP (Point of Presence). It has a cache of the data that the users in this specific location will use. CDN doesn’t substitute the web hosting; it just makes many cached data of the original data and stores it around the world for better accessibility. It works using the GeoDNS technology so the visitors of your website will be connected to the fastest/closest server, without the need to get the data from the web hosting. CDN saves a lot of time.

Why is it important?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is important because it improves the performance, scalability, and security of websites and applications. By distributing content across multiple servers located in different geographic locations, CDNs can deliver content faster and more efficiently to users. That way, it reduces latency, improves page load times, and provides a better user experience. CDNs can also handle high volumes of traffic, reducing server load and improving website scalability. Furthermore, CDNs offer security features such as DDoS protection and web application firewalls, which help protect against cyber threats. Overall, CDNs are an essential tool for modern businesses that rely on fast and efficient content delivery, global reach, and robust security.

History of CDN

Different technologies affected the birth of CDN – hierarchical caching, server farms, cache proxy deployment and improved web servers.
The first generation of CDN came around the late 90’s. People created them because of the growing use of on-demand content (audio, video, etc.). Dynamic and static content delivery. It was mostly intelligent routing and edge computer methods. The second and current generation, is cloud-based, relying on a peer-to-peer connection and it is focused on video-on-demand.

How does it work?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers distributed geographically to deliver web content to users more quickly and efficiently. When a user requests a web page, the CDN provides the content from a server closer to the user’s location, reducing the time it takes to load.

The process of delivering content through a CDN typically involves the following steps:

1. A user requests a website or a specific web page from their browser.
2. The user’s request is received by the nearest CDN server, called an edge server, to their geographic location. The edge server is determined based on the user’s IP address, which reveals their location.
3. If the edge server has a cached copy of the requested content, it serves it directly to the user’s browser. Caching involves storing a copy of the content on the edge server. That way, it can be delivered more quickly to users in the future.
4. If the edge server doesn’t have a cached copy of the content, it requests it from the origin server. The origin server is the original source of the content, typically the website’s hosting server.
5. The origin server responds by sending the requested content to the edge server.
6. The edge server caches the received content from the origin server for future requests.
7. Finally, the edge server provides the requested content to the user’s browser.

By distributing content across multiple servers, a CDN can reduce the load on the origin server and provide a more reliable and scalable infrastructure for delivering content to users worldwide. Additionally, since edge servers are located closer to users, the time it takes to load web pages is significantly reduced, improving the user experience.

For who is it?

Anyone can benefit from CDN. From the big companies that we mentioned before and small blog websites. The technology increases the speed of the website and can be very useful even if you have just a WordPress blog. This helps the SEO, and your website will rank a lot better in Google, and your visitors will be happier thanks to the speed boost.

Here are some examples of who can benefit the most from implementing a CDN:

• E-commerce Platforms: E-commerce websites can experience irregular traffic patterns, especially during peak shopping seasons or promotional events. CDNs help these platforms deliver product images, videos, and web pages quickly and efficiently to customers worldwide, ensuring a seamless shopping experience and maximizing sales.
• Media and Entertainment Companies: Streaming services, gaming platforms, and content providers rely heavily on CDNs to deliver high-quality audio and video content to users across different locations, devices and platforms. CDNs minimize buffering, reduce latency, and ensure smooth playback, enhancing the overall user experience and driving engagement.
• Software Companies: Software companies distribute updates, patches, and installation files to users globally. CDNs accelerate the download process, reduce bandwidth consumption, and ensure reliable delivery of software updates, enabling users to access the latest releases quickly and securely.
• News and Publishing Websites: News websites and publishing platforms require fast and reliable content delivery to keep readers informed and engaged. CDNs ensure timely delivery of articles, images, and multimedia content, even during periods of high traffic volume or breaking news events, enhancing reader satisfaction and retention.
• Gaming Industry: Online gaming platforms depend on low-latency, high-performance networks to deliver an immersive gaming experience to players worldwide. CDNs minimize lag, reduce packet loss, and optimize server response times, providing gamers with enhanced gameplay experiences.

How to create your CDN using DNS

Benefits

CDN is able to provide numerous benefits, some of which are the following:

• The most significant benefit is definitely the speed. It reduces the latency; everything loads way faster than before. How fast? On average 70% faster!
• Load balancing. By using different PoPs around the world, the traffic gets well distributed, and it reduces the traffic on the original server.
• It reduces the bandwidth consumption, so if your web host has low bandwidth, this can help you a lot.
• It has DDoS protection. It protects you from a single point of failure, thanks to the many different PoPs.
• It will improve the SEO of your site. Google values the speed of your website as one of the key indicators for ranking in its search engine.

Conclusion

Content Delivery Networks are getting more popular thanks to its advantages. Many people start using it for E-commerce Entertainment and blog sites. It can help you over rank your competitors on the Google pages and provide a better uptime. There is no doubt that this solution is definitely worth trying!

The post What is CDN (Content Delivery Network)? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

How does a CDN work?

To shorten the physical distance between the users and the hosting server, the CDN keeps cached versions of the original content in different geographical locations known as Points of Presence (PoP). Each of these PoPs is located strategically to serve to the users nearby.
This way, you as a user, don’t need to connect to the original source (the original server). The CDN will direct you to the closest connected server on the network, and you will get the cached version of the original version.

The benefits of a CDN

• The most obvious is the speed. The content loads faster. According to recent tests from the Content Delivery Network KeyCDN, using a CDN reduces website latency on average by 73% compared to websites running without a CDN.
• Handle heavy traffic. The load is handled between the PoPs and it is not so heavy for the original server.
• It reduces the bandwidth consumption.
• It is more secure and protects you from DDoS attacks, more Points of Presence (PoPs), fewer chances of your original server to be affected.
• Faster loading time will improve the SEO of the website.
• There are more benefits but these are the main. Based on these advantages, the CDNs are getting more and more popular every day. Especially for E-commerce and Entertainment.

Do I need a CDN for my website?

The internet has become quite dependent on Content Delivery Network to manage a significant amount of its content. But just because CDNs are a common practice doesn’t mean you need to consider investing in one. It’s necessary to understand how CDN DNS works and consider whether it’d be useful for your website’s needs.

CDNs are great for allowing users to access web content quickly and efficiently, even if they’re far away from where your web origin host is located. If most of your audience is nearby and can effectively access your website without much difficulty, then you may not need a CDN for your website. However, if you’re reaching a larger audience from different places, then it would be wise to invest in a CDN service. Video streaming websites, social media platforms, online journalism outlets, digital publications and eCommerce sites all benefit from having their own CDN, because it makes it easier for them to reach a larger global audience. It also allows for faster loading, which can provide more potential visitors and more potential readers. 

Overall, the advantages of a fast-loading website far outweigh the costs, and should not be ignored.

Does DNS need to be modified to support CDN?

Yes, DNS must be modified to support CDN. Domain Name System (DNS) stores, logs and allocates the IP address of your web content between web users and your web server, so any change in web content needs to be reflected in the underlying DNS record. CDN, on the other hand, adds multiple distributed server networks to reduce the amount of time needed for content to travel from the origin to the final destination. In order for these different distributed networks to work effectively, the DNS must be configured to route requests through the CDN, which allows for quicker content delivery and reduced latency. Furthermore, CDNs also use DNS to direct visitors geographically to their nearest server, which helps reduce the time it takes for the web content to load on their browser.

How to create your own CDN using DNS

To set up a CDN using your own Anycast can be very expensive. But don’t worry, there are cheaper solutions. For example, you can use GeoDNS and ordinary servers with unique IP addresses. With our GeoDNS service you can build your own CDN or Geolocation Load Balancing with highly accurate geolocation service that makes the decisions based on the real location of the visitor, not on the location of the DNS resolver. You can easily configure your DNS zone to show American server IP to the visitors from The USA and to the European visitors, another IP from Europe.
It might sound hard to you but don’t worry, we can help you. Our professional team of experts can provide you directions and you can start benefiting from your CDN in no time. Give it in our hands and we will do all the configuration needed.

So what are you waiting for? Make the experience for your visitors better and faster. Segment your traffic and send users to the servers designed just for them. This can increase their happiness and make them more likely to engage and convert.

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