GoDaddy DNS – Or other slow DNS responders

 

Within the last few weeks, we’ve seen a spike in customers reporting that DNS monitors are “falsely” showing GoDaddy.com hosted DNS as DOWN.  Subsequent discussions with customers and their discussions with GoDaddy.com agents reveal that GoDaddy.com DNS services are technically UP but occassionally resolving in greater than 3 seconds.  This is a problem we find with other DNS providers from time to time, but seems to be a larger issue recently.

Our Philosophy

MxToolbox philosophy is that DNS resolution should be less that 3 seconds at all times.  We think of it this way: If your customers are looking for your site, they shouldn’t be waiting for 3 seconds plus the page load time of your site before they get to see your brand.  Instead, DNS should always resolve fast enough so that your customers find your site quickly.  Would you really want your customers’ first impressions to be that your systems are slow?  Neither would we.

So, what’s the solution?

Our experts have been thinking and discussing the issue and we came up with a couple of options:

  • Keep Monitoring – When your DNS is slower than 3 seconds, we will alert you. You should know that your performance is slow for your customers.  
  • Keep Talking to your DNS hosting provider – When they’re slow, let them know.  Only your provider can improve their performance.
  • Consider other options – If you regularly find your DNS resolving slowly, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to a better DNS hosting solution.
  • Set a filter – MxToolbox monitoring includes customizable filtering options in the Notifications Policy Page.  You could setup a Policy to require two or more warnings in a row before alerting you, to delay the alert or to suppress the alert entirely.

Regardless of the direction you take with your DNS, know that MxToolbox is here to support you with expertise in networking, email, web and everything else you need to keep your business up and running on the internet.

About MxToolbox

MxToolbox.com offers free tools and paid monitoring packages to small, medium and large enterprises worldwide.  Our monitoring packages enable business to know immediately if a common networking, blacklisting or system performance issue occurs.  No other company provides such a comprehensive suite of solutions that can scale from small business to a service provider with hundreds of thousands of IP addresses.