Image by Toni Birrer via Flickr
Always intresting to see Verisign either launch a scary proposal to take down domain names and in another article warns people about domain name downtime due to network issues
Availability of online e-commerce sites could be at risk — even for the largest e-tailers — due to Domain Name System (DNS) performance issues. Considering that the busy holiday shopping season is just around the corner, any unavailability during this critical time can be devastating for businesses, according to a new study commissioned by VeriSign, Inc.(NASDAQ: VRSN), a provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world.
The latest Verisign State of DNS Availability Report found that in the second quarter of 2011, even the top e-commerce sites suffered the kind of DNS failures that erode revenue and threaten customer loyalty. The report also spotlights the widespread need for solutions that ensure DNS availability — a crucial requirement for the reliable operation of websites, network services, and online communications.
Research Highlights:
Using proprietary technology, ThousandEyes, a company that provides application performance analytics, calculated the minimum, maximum, and average DNS availability of the Alexa 1,000 websites during the second quarter of 2011 to illustrate the state of global DNS availability.
The study found that minimum DNS availability averaged 95.05 percent for United States (U.S.) sites that host their own DNS, while U.S. sites using third-party managed DNS services averaged a minimum DNS availability of 97.35 percent.
This 2.3 percent difference in minimum availability equates to approximately 40 more minutes of downtime daily for sites with internally managed DNS.
Other key findings include:
1. U.S. websites with self-managed DNS experience almost 40 minutes more downtime daily, on average, than third-party managed sites.
2. Global minimum DNS availability averaged 95.30 percent for sites that host their own DNS, while sites using third-party managed DNS services averaged a minimum DNS availability rate of 97.14 percent.
3. Sites with internally managed DNS have a higher propensity to experience near to total outages, while sites with third-party DNS management did not experience total outages.
4. Businesses that rely on their online presence for critical operations, such as e-commerce, need to invest in secondary DNS management services — particularly if their primary DNS management strategy is internal — to act as a failsafe to serve traffic to their websites in the event that the primary DNS management tool becomes unavailable.
In addition to the DNS availability research, Verisign examined its own DDoS Protection Service customer data and found that e-commerce customers are facing longer than average Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The report notes that since Jan. 1, 2011, DDoS attacks mitigated by Verisign for its e-commerce customers lasted 40 percent longer than the DDoS attacks it mitigated for all other customer verticals combined.
“Maintaining a world-class DNS infrastructure is a complex undertaking that requires enormous scale and expertise,” said Ben Petro, senior vice president of Verisign’s Network Intelligence and Availability Group.
“As this latest research shows, self-managed DNS results in significantly lower availability that can cut into a company’s bottom line. With the host of other competitive issues facing retailers today, there’s no reason that website availability should be one of them when they can rely on Verisign’s suite of network intelligence and availability services to keep their sites up and running.”
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