Interview With DNS.com

The Louisville technology community is small; I recently spilt a case of Newcastle Brown Ale with some of the team from DNS.com.  They have developed some great technology and are a good example of how the proper domain name can increase traffic.  Excerpts from my interview with Dan Kimball the CEO of DNS.com are below:

Stacy – DNS.com decided to build its own DNS technology instead of reusing a technology like BIND, can you walk me through the decision process and advantages of this decision?

Dan – The fundamentals of DNS technology have been largely unchanged since inception. This is an industry that has seen very little innovation. As you may know, DNS was designed to be a scalable distributed system, with little regard for security. A few initiatives have been proposed since the 90s to add security, such as DNSSEC and DNSCurve, but have only recently started seeing some adoption. We decided on a bottom up approach, proprietary technology that runs the way we want it. It also runs faster than traditional systems.

BIND has the advantage of being the most common DNS server. Unfortunately, this has resulted in it being the most commonly exploited DNS server. BIND security advisories are announced all the time. Just over the last few months there have been advisories for cache poisoning issues, denial of service (server crashes), and mishandled responses reported in BIND. This is just when they’ve been caught and reported; who knows how long they have been in the wild. Attackers know the holes and exploits and there are plenty of unpatched systems out there.  Many of the distributed DoS attacks that knock nameservers offline are related to inherent weaknesses in BIND’s technology. Many of these problems are on live machines at hosting companies and datacenters. Unless your company proactively stays on top of all the latest BIND news, you’re vulnerable.

We have talked with hosts and datacenters who began building their own DNS network only to find the upkeep of BIND was too much to deal with. Likewise it is cost prohibitive for your typical provider to build out a worldwide DNS network. A non-anycast DNS network these days is dated technology. The last two decades, location was largely irrelevant to the Internet. In the age of Foursquare and Facebook, you are seeing that location matters again, and today both consumers and marketers are intensely aware of the value of location. A globally distributed anycast network hands out resolution faster and more reliably, and paired with geo-location provides a robust platform for content delivery and localization.

Stacy – You recently purchased the domain DNS.com how has that impacted traffic and sales?

Dan – The acquisition has greatly improved awareness of our services. Traffic is up 700% and the site has only in the last few weeks started appearing in search results. It is short, easy to remember, and a natural starting point for people seeking DNS services and information. There are few other places you can get this kind of visibility.

The biggest impact we have seen is the variety of clients to which we are now exposed. With DNS.com we are going mass market. We are seeing interest from online retailers, startups, you name it. Initially we targeted the vertical markets of domain owners and web hosts. Once we expanded our network and refined both our hardware and software, we were comfortable that we had an enterprise-ready product and a service worthy of the DNS.com moniker.

We have identified that many visitors to the site are also looking for DNS lookup tools and not strictly DNS service, so we are working to accommodate those users as well.

Stacy – What advantages do clients see from outsourcing DNS to a 3rd party instead of using DNS provided by their hosting company?

Dan – Most hosting companies are not DNS experts. Servers may be unpatched, nameservers fail, DDoS attacks happen. You normally don’t hear about it until a crisis affects a major domain name registrar, hosting company, or customer-facing website. Thousands and even millions of users can be affected in one fell swoop. We view DNS as the first line of defense. No matter how redundant a web hosting company’s servers are, how many network carriers they use, or how many remote backups are in place, if your DNS is not resolving it’s all a wasted effort.

There are some managed providers who do a very good job. However, third party providers are specialists. Particularly with an anycast network, potential disruptions to end users are minimal. If one node goes down, traffic is immediately shifted to the rest of the network.

Further, in many cases the interfaces provided for DNS management by web hosts and registrars are simple and restrictive. We offer an advanced control panel that allows clients to manage their records and apply geographic rules. One website can now have many different versions targeted to visitors by country, state, city, or some other common characteristic such as language. Personalized versions of the site can then be displayed automatically, with no action required by the visitor. Because this all happens on the backend, it is instant and unnoticeable to visitors, but allows for unlimited content customization.

Stacy – What are the advantages to hosting companies from partnering with DNS.com for DNS instead of providing it themselves?

Dan – Price, ease, and global coverage. The barriers to entry for building out a comparative network are high. We have done the legwork for you. As a partner, you get the benefits of a robust, scalable, worldwide DNS network, plus the luxury of more time to focus on your core business. We offer white label repackaging of our interface and provide an API for custom integrations and provisioning. For those who have not considered selling premium DNS, we recommend it as a value added service that can be packaged with domain registration and web hosting at the point of sale.