Back in the early 80s, the Internet was a newly emerging technology with kinks that need to be ironed out. One of these kinks is the fact that the Internet needed a system that will allow users to navigate the world wide web in a natural manner instead of relying on IP addresses, which would have made even the simplest browsing session too complicated for the average user.

Enter: The Domain Name Server. It’s not an overly complicated solution, but the DNS practically solved the problem instantly. Instead on relying on a series of numbers to access a web page, users can just input Domain Names, which then route traffic to the actual servers hosting the files being accessed. Without DNS, everybody would still be inputting 54.57.208.111 or some other IP address on their browser’s URL field instead of an easier to remember address like, say, Google.com.

http://www.prestigetechnologies.com/DidYouKnow/index.php/2014/05/google-web-designer-the-review/

Over time, the Internet has found its way into common and business use, and has developed various accoutrements to help encourage activities on both ends. The DNS is still largely unchanged, but businesses have discovered a few uses that will help them accelerate their growth. Here are a few of them:

Manage Traffic Efficiently

Whether a company’s website is used for direct sales or for marketing and branding, the issue of traffic is an often overlooked but nonetheless important issue. Getting as much traffic as possible is one of the major goals of a website, but if you get too much, you may end up using all the allotted bandwidth or even bring down the host’s servers. The main problems that this scenario will cause is that the users won’t be able to access your website or it will be very slow, causing them to leave. Another problem is that the accessibility of the website says a lot about the company it represents, which means it could turn into a reputation problem.

Normally, it is easy to solve problems with traffic by simply throwing as much money into the problem, getting the best host that you can buy – but as with any business, it’s not wise to spend money that you could have saved by going for more practical solutions. There are currently two ways that Prestige uses to solve this problem:

1. Weighted Load Balancing

Weighted load balancing is essentially an improvement over conventional load balancing – which simply routes DNS requests in a simple round-robin fashion across multiple resources (like data centers, cloud providers, and CDNs). With Weighted load balancing, computing resources are assigned “weights” or percentage. For example, 25% of DNS requests will be routed to server A, while server B gets 25% more, and the remaining 50% is routed to server C. So if server C is reaching its full capacity, weighted load balancing will lower its weight and assigns more traffic to A or B. The main benefits of this process is that it shapes latency for all of your users equally, ensuring that no single user will experience fast speeds at the cost of other people experiencing lags or dropped requests.

2. Automated Failover

Automated Failover is in principle similar to Weighed Load Balancing, but instead of assigning weights to computing resources, it is simply monitored so that when a resource underperforms, it is temporarily rerouted to another resource point until the problem is fixed. It doesn’t have to be a complete failure, as what is considered a “failover” is based on the thresholds for acceptable performance set by the administrators. By setting the threshold above what is considered lagging, all users are ensured of fast response time and absolutely no dropped requests.

Prestige allows for both Weighted Load Balancing and Automated Failover, ensuring that our clients will not overspend on unnecessary plan upgrades, while also ensuring that their users still experience fast and consistent loading speeds on their websites. The money saved on bandwidth upgrades could then be spent more on the company and help it build its bottomline.

There are more ways that the DNS can help your business grow on part two of this post.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2014 at 7:06 am and is filed under Content Management System, Data Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.