Tag: load balancing

PowerDNS

What is PowerDNS? Open-source BIND alternative

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

Have you ever heard about PowerDNS? It is a complete software platform that you can use instead of BIND. It provides excellent performance and doesn’t use a lot of resources.

PowerDNS

The history of PowerDNS

The company started in 1999 with the task to write load balancing software for V3 Redirection Services for “come.to”, “browse.to“, and “go.to”. Back then, it was still a close-source. After the Dot Com Bubble, the company needed to re-think their future and released the software as an open-source. It started to provide commercial services from 2005 and in 2015 became a part of Open-Xchange.

PowerDNS platform

PowerDNS or pdns is an open-source (GPL) software. It provides software to create authoritative DNS, Recursive DNS, DNS loading balancer, Debugging tools, and APIs to provision zones and records. A complete suite of DNS-related software that you can use for your company.

Authoritative Server

It enables the authoritative DNS service from all popular databases like MySql, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, Microsoft SQL Server, LDAP, and text files.

Authoritative Server works with many different scripts like Java, Python, C, C++, Perl, Lua. You can use it for dynamic redirection, spam filter, or real-time intervention.

Authoritative Server supports DNSSEC. It hosts 30% of all domain names in Europe and close to 90% of all DNSSEC domain in the same area.

Recursor (recursive DNS)

It provides a high-performance recursive DNS server. PowerDNS Recursor can use multiple processors. Just like the Authoritative Server, it supports various scripts. A good advantage is that it can be reconfigured without downtime.

Dnsdist (load balancer)

Dnsdist is a powerful load balancer. It can route the traffic to the optimal servers delivering excellent performance. It also can block abusive traffic and provide DoS protection.

Benefits of PowerDNS

  • Instant startup when hosting many domains
  • Use of multi-core (32+ cores) processors
  • Low memory requirement
  • DNSSEC
  • High performance
  • Support different scripts
  • Support different types of databases
  • IPv6 support

Conclusion

PowerDNS is a great alternative to BIND. It is full of features, and it can provide a quality and secure service.  

Speed up WordPress with CDN

Martin Pramatarov / / CDN

WordPress has taken the internet by storm. It is the most commonly used CMS (content management system) out there. Plenty of people are using it. With this popularity, the competition is fears. There are a lot of speed up WordPress optimizations that you can do from within, like using a barebone theme, optimizing the content or using caching plugins but all of that request that you have SEO knowledge. You can speed up your WordPress from outside by using CDN (content delivery system).

WordPress

What is CDN?

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Can we use free DNS? Free DNS vs. Premium

Martin Pramatarov / / DNS

If you are searching already free DNS, you know what DNS is and for what it serves. The DNS will resolve your domain name. If you have more DNS servers and they are spread around the world, this process will be faster, and it will reduce the load. It will even add an extra level of protection, imagine if one of the servers is down, the users can still find your domain using the rest of the DNS servers.

Free DNS

Free DNS

Different companies offer such a Free DNS plan like us from ClouDNS.net. With this plan, you can manage your DNS. It has many of the features of a professional DNS plan. You can use up to 4 DNS servers and 3 DNS zones. You will have three mail forwards. This plan is popular among people who need Dynamic DNS for their connected devices like CCTV cameras and other security measurements. It is used for personal blogs or parked domains.

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Round Robin Load Balancing. Simple and efficient

Martin Pramatarov / / Load balancing

We have already talked about load balancing. You can read the previous article HERE. Briefly explained, the traffic on the internet is constantly increasing. There are more devices connected and the data that circuit is more too. In order to manage all of this load, you need a load balancer that distributes it among the servers to reduce the load. Now we will focus just on one method to do so – Round Robin.

Round Robin

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Why media can’t live without CDN

Martin Pramatarov / / CDN

Do you remember the time when we were reading the news in a printed newspaper and we were going to a video store to rent a VHS? The things have changed a lot ever since. Now you get the daily brief from an online portal and the content rental stores are all in the clouds. CDN is responsible for the global distribution of all that content. It makes it possible that all the viewers get their content in a matter of milliseconds, even if they live far away from the source.

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).

CDN

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What is CDN (Content delivery network)?

Martin Pramatarov / / CDN

Everybody uses CDN (content delivery network). YouTube, Amazon, Netflix and many others are applying it in a massive world scale so you can enjoy your favorite content in a matter of milliseconds. But how does it work?

CDN

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DNS load balancing vs. Hardware load balancing

Martin Pramatarov / / Load balancing

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.load balancing

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What is Traffic Director?

Martin Pramatarov / / Load balancing

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 or GeoDNS director, but it is best known as GeoDNS, and that is why we use this term as the name of our service.

Traffic Director

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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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