8 DNS tools for testing your servers

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

You are already a DNS user, and your server or website works great when you visit it from your computer. But that is not enough. You want to be sure that the DNS works great all around the world. For example, your primary server is in the US, but you want to see if there is not too much latency in Singapore, what should you do? Or you want to compare with your rivals, to know which is their provider and how well is it performing? There are many DNS tools that you can easily use for free, to check your DNS servers and to see if everything is working well. Each of these tools has slightly different functionality, just follow us, and we will explain to you what are they good for.

DNS check

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What is Anycast DNS and how does it work?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

For many years already, the Unicast protocol has been outdated for the purpose of fast and secure DNS. It can’t manage with massive DDoS attacks, can’t handle load balancing in different locations, and it is quite slow for a global presence. But don’t get desperate, a new technology is there to help you out.

So what can you use to provide fast and reliable DNS?

Anycast DNS is here to step in. It is by far superior technology! It reduces latency, give extra security and minimize downtime.

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What is Secondary DNS?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

We have already talked what is a DNS server or name server as it is also known. It is a complicated system that translates what we write (the domain name and address of a website that we desire) to IP addresses that computers and servers can understand.

Any DNS can be programmed to be primary (master) or secondary (slave), depends on the needs of the system as a whole. You can even have a primary DNS server that is secondary for another zone.

So what is the difference?

The hierarchy. The primary is the main one, and the secondary gets the DNS records from the primary. There are few different configurations of connecting the secondary that we would show you in a bit, but first, we want to explain to you why you need a secondary DNS.
If it does the same, why do you need it?

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DNS best practices

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

You cannot imagine the internet without DNS. There is almost no service that doesn’t depend on DNS technology. E-mails, VoIP, web services, all kind of CRM and ERP systems and much more. DNS is so important that we must take care of our network and make it as secure as possible.

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.

dns best practice

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.

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What are 301 and 302 redirects and how to use them?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS, Web forwarding

Imagine, after a long time, you need to open a bookmark that you have more than a few years already. You try to open it, and…suddenly you see an error – “404 Page not found”. The page you were looking for has gone without a trace, maybe the whole website is missing, or maybe it was just a small change of the URL, but you will probably never know.

This is your first touch with an HTTP status codes, and specifically with 400-type. There are different status code types: 1XX Information responses, 2XX Success, 3XX Redirection, 4XX client errors and 5XX server errors.

You know the owner of the website could have evaded this error with a straightforward action – use a redirection!

Put yourself in the owner’s shoes and let’s see how to avoid such problems.

There are two redirection methods which are mostly used – 301 (moved permanently) and 302 (moved temporarily). Continue reading “What are 301 and 302 redirects and how to use them?”

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What is DNS?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

Domain Name System – DNS

 

DNS – Domain Name System is an amazing technology. It helps us open internet addresses without a hustle. We easily write the domain name and the DNS has the job to find the IP of the domain we wrote. Just like the phone book on your mobile phone, you need to find Mike, so you write “Mike”, and you don’t need to remember his actual number, great isn’t it?

DNS is an essential part of the Internet. It manages to translate all the inquiries into IP addresses, and like this, it can identify different devices that are connected to the network.

 

DNS - Domain Name System

 

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What is Load Balancing?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS, Load balancing

Load Balancing

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 managed 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, the load balancing has gotten a new shaped. Now it is not a simple distribution system. The load balancing has become very divided.

For example, 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.

 

Load Balancing

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How to create your CDN using DNS

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS, Load balancing

We already showed you what DNS is but do you know what CDN stands for?

A CDN – Content Delivery Network is responsible for the content delivery. We all interact with CDNs on a daily basis – when we watch a video, when we read an article, when we shop online or when we use a social network site. The main reason why they exist is to reduce latency, the delay between your demand and the moment it gets on your screen. Higher latency makes us impatient and gets us angry. There are many reasons it can happen, but the main is the physical distance between your computer and the server which hosts the website. CDN makes the magic of shortening that distance, and by doing so, it improves the speed dramatically.

 

cdn-content delivery network

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Why do we need Managed DNS?

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

DNS and why does it matter?

DNS – domain name system is a marvelous invention. It makes it easy for all of us to enter our favorite addresses on the web. We don’t need to remember thousands of IP numbers of all websites that we use; we simply write the domain name and the DNS magically matches our text with the associated IP and show us the result.

dns-domain name system

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Benefits from using Anycast DNS

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

Anycast DNS is one amazing technology that can save you a lot of time.

But first, let’s explain it to you in a simple way so you really understand why this can help you with your company network.

What is a DNS server?

Imagine it as a massive phone book. They contain a register of domain names and translate them to IP (internet protocol) addresses. For us humans it is easy to remember the domain names but the computers, they prefer numbers to orientate so they access websites based on their IPs.
The information of those DNS servers is saved and organized in the Central Registry. Internet providers and Host companies need to check with the Central Registry to get all the DNS updates.
When you write the following web address www.facebook.com, your service provider will check the DNS for this website, then translate to machine language and direct you to the following IP 66.220.144.0.

DNS server - domain name server

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