Enom DNS Outage, Host your own DNS
What a great way to start the new year. Yesterday we had an outage which lasted just under a couple of hours. It was not a complete outage some customers were still able to access the website and place orders, but then some of those orders did not process correctly.
The problem was due to Enom DNS servers being the target of a Denial of Service attack leading to around 30 million websites going off-line. (Simple explanation: DNS servers convert domain names into IP addresses so computers can talk to each other. A Denial of Service attack is when a computer system is flooded with data causing it to fail or become unresponsive - remember geeks not everyone understands these things!)
We use the Enom DNS service, like many others do, because it provides us with less to manage internally. However as the Enom system has become so large it has also become a target.
The alternative is to host your own DNS server. This is something we (and no doubt many others) are now considering. Well if you are considering hosting your own DNS servers then take a look at SimpleDNS Plus from JH Software. Easy to use and comes with a free trial.
Sorry for the inconvenience caused by the DNS problems. If you have any questions or comments please let us know.
Posted
by Andy Gambles
