The benefits of Anycast DNS
When looking for a reliable DNS solution, you may often come across the term of Anycast and Unicast DNS. This article looks at the benefits of using Anycast vs Unicast, Neustar’s Ultra DNS offering, which is an Anycast DNS solution.
What is Unicast DNS?
When using Unicast DNS, an IP address applies to only one server – meaning that data is stored in one place and is most cases where the DNS server is physically located. It will always use this server regardless of where the user is located, therefore increasing latency. This poses great risk in that, if the DNS server crashed or there was a DDOS attack on that server, the site would go down.
Whilst Unicast DNS is still an acceptable solution, we don’t recommend using this for critical domain names. Instead, we recommend using an Anycast solution (such as Neustars Ultra DNS), to ensure greater website performance and increased security.
What is Anycast DNS?
With Anycast DNS, an IP address can apply to many servers – meaning that any one of a number of DNS servers can respond to DNS queries (usually the one that is geographically closest will provide the response). This provides great benefits from a security and reliability perspective:
- Faster website resolution, due to the closest node being served.
- Number of built-in security features such as DDOS protection and DNSSEC.
- Neustar Ultra DNS has 30 nodes across 6 continents, ensuring 100% uptime.
- If there is a DDOS attack on a server, that node would be shut down and traffic would route to the next available node, ensuring no downtime on websites.
- Anycast DNS allows automatic load balancing, ensuring requests are distributed across all servers.
At Brandsec we offer both Unicast and Anycast DNS Solutions. Talk to Brandsec on how we can assist with domain name and DNS management and work with you to implement the right solution for your business.
Contact us today for a free consultation.
About brandsec
Brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that look after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.