GoDaddy's outage the other day brought a number of websites down for a very long time. Were you effected? do you want to know why, and how you can prevent it?
Domain Name / DNS OverviewSo first off i'd like to state that your site wasn't down, it was just unreachable. First we'll have to go through a brief overview of what happens when you go to a website in your browser (i'm going to generalize this a bit for the non-tech people, so if you're a tech person forgive me)
Computers speak to each other through what's called an IP address, this is how they know how to find each other. Think of it like a phone number for a computer.
So what happens when you type
http://www.fugitiverecovery.com in your browser, is it has to do what's called a DNS lookup (Domain Name Service). Basically like a phone book, you lookup someones name, and get their phone number. It asks the registrars what servers are responsible for this name, then asks those servers for the ip address associated with that domain. There are some more steps involved but not really necessary to explain this scenario. One thing that is notable though is that your internet providers own DNS servers usually hit first, and if they have a saved copy of these records that have not expired, they will return the ip address without ever hitting the dns servers responsible.
So what happened with GoDaddy?So GoDaddy had an issue with their routers (please don't believe that child with little tech knowledge that's trying to convince people he hacked them), think of it like your home router that connects you to the internet, the internet is basically tons of routers connected to each other. So GoDaddy's router issues essentially cut off access to their DNS servers (the ones that are keeping track of what ip address your site is at). So when you typed in the domain name it couldn't reach the DNS servers and therefore couldn't get the IP Address (your servers phone number) of your site so that it could actually request it.
If you were to manually tell your computer what ip address to use for that domain via your /etc/hosts file for mac/unix/linux, or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc \hosts file on Windows you would have been able to hit your site like nothing happened.
Ok, Ok. But how do I prevent it from happening again?The answer here, is you're able to tell your registrar (place you purchased your domain name through) about many DNS servers. So what you do is use multiple companies for DNS (these are cheap, usually around $30-60/year), and a secondary DNS company which will basically update itself to match the primary DNS provider.
Then as your computer fails to access the first dns server, it will try the second, until it finally finds one that it can reach. By using 2 separate providers you ensure that a catastrophic failure at one (like what happened with GoDaddy) you're still live. We use 8 DNS servers, 6 provided by the primary provider, 2 from our secondary provider.
I personally love: dnsmadeeasy.com (primary), buddyns.com (secondary).
Although a step by step of how to do this would be nice, it would probably be time consuming to do here, and each of those sites and alternative providers have some good tutorials, or ask your webmaster/web developer, or if any of you have specific questions you can post them here and i'll answer them.
If it's a huge concern, and you don't have a webmaster/web developer PM me.
