If you find yourself involved and interested in the title of this article, you probably already know what DNS is, how the DNS service is working, and what is the role of DNS server. We will talk in detail about a particular scenario – How to tweak the system and make DNS queries faster?
It happens to every one of us sometimes to struggle with slow loading websites. Not all websites are loaded equally in the browsers – takes different time for each one and this depends on many factors. Primarily is about technology or else how the website was built. An interesting gap describes the response time, which is precisely the time between the client sends a request to the website, and the moment the client receives the first elements of it in the browser.
How to explain this gap? Is it related to the client’s or webserver’s locations? How much time will the data need to transfer between the source and the destination?
To answer this we need to look to the bigger picture. Response Time is a crucial factor for the competitiveness of your website, it can attract clients when fast, as well as push them away in case of slowness. We at Gransy want to bring value to your business and to give you a perfect asset to your toolkit on how to make the Response time as short as possible, giving you the best performance and best User Experience (UX).
The solution is AnyCast DNS.
DNS Rally Paris – Dakar
Lets describe a possible scenario\situation so we can get clarer imagination of the difference that Anycast DNS service can create for your business.
Imagine you live in sunny Dakar, you get curious and want to open gransy.fr to check the latest domain news. You type the URL in the address bar (our example gransy.fr), your browser sends a query to a local (ISP) server to find that particular website. On the next hop, the ISP server is contacting ICANN server to ask if “.fr” exist and what is its IP address.Then he gets a response – “I know where is that TLD you are looking for, this is the registry server of French registry and he is located in Paris at this IP address”. Finding TLD can be skipped if someone before you asked for a website for .fr, and this information is already answered.
In reality, servers are not saying all that, just answering with IP address, and correspond in their language. The next query is sent to .fr DNS server, now to find gransy.fr. DNS server of the registry is responding with the IP address of the exact DNS server, where the website is hosted. Now your server is asking that DNS server: “can you send me the address of hosting of that website, please”, and after response, your server is looking for this particular IP address where is the hosting. And after all that, the website starts to load. A lot of talks, isn’t it?
In essence, this is what is happening behind the scenes on the internet each time you press ENTER (after typing an URL in the browser) or after clicking on the link, until you start to see the first parts of the website in the browser. Those negotiations between servers can be fast, just a couple of seconds, but more often, it is slow. So how to make this all “blah blah” between servers much faster?
The first thought in our example is about geography – it’s a long way to reach the registry server in Paris from Dakar. While in the real world, it’s not possible to “shorten” the distance between Paris and Dakar (if you don’t believe it, ask any rally driver), in the digital world – there is a way. Imagine if we replicate the DNS server of .fr registry, and put that replica-server in Dakar, then the query “where is that .fr” and second “where is gransy.fr”, mentioned above, will not exit Dakar – they will be redirected to the closest server (that replica we made) and it will be all local queries, fast and furious. And if we act clever, make more replicas and put them on each continent to cover as much as we can geographically, all regions and states in the world, we would be able to cut that particular response time for almost every user.
This idea is called Anycast DNS – the network of DNS replicas all over the world, covering all continents, and serving to cut the distance and time for the responses of the domains. The companies that provide such service are called Anycast DNS providers and guess what – we are one of them.
Fast and furious
We welcome you to our newly developed website, where you can find interesting facts about Gransy Anycast DNS, explore the details and get familiar with the proven advantages of this service. We say “proven” with pride as this statement is result of the “One-Speed Test ” for Anycast DNS, provided only by DNSPerf website. The outcome of this test shows that Gransy Anycast DNS services are in the great Top 3 worldwide. One of the Best, and One that is used by Many.
We follow a daily philosophy dedicated to making our customers happy. We have about 10ccTLD registries, which fully rely on Gransy Anycast DNS services to securely speed up the response time of their domain names. Recent example is “.gt” , a national registry of Guatemala. They were impressed by the positive test results and shortly after became our customers, attracted by the quality and security of AnyCast DNS. There also multiple other registrars and private companies, which offer our services to their customers.
User experience – response time, SEO and security
At Gransy we fully understand that at the end of every day is all about User Experience. This was a leading factor in the development process of AnyCast DNS services, which provides multiple important value-adding benefits for your business, such as great Response Time, security on a high level and business-friendly dashboards for optimal usage and monitoring. Our holistic approach opens the door for your SEO optimization opportunities. Search engines (Google f.e.) assign an average “eligible” loading time per website. By optimizing response time, the user’s website makes a good impression on these search engines, and therefore the ranking of the website evolves.
The most important benefit user can get is guaranteed accessibility. In case of something goes wrong with DNS servers of the user’s website, without Anycast DNS service – in the event of a breakdown or attack (DDoS f.e.), the website and the related data will be no longer accessible.
With many replications around the world, Anycast DNS service ensures that the user’s website will be always accessible. If one of the Anycast DNS servers falls, the next one (closest to the user who asked for the website) will take over.
In a few words, we can describe the benefits of the Anycast DNS network – fast response, better SEO, and guaranteed accessibility.
Can I buy 1,5 kg of that Anycast service?
Anycast DNS is a perfectly suitable solution for Anyone who operates in the Domain Industry and desire innovation on behalf of their customers. The sky is the limit!
Anycast DNS, provided by Gransy, offers worldwide coverage, competitive speed, and reliability for your organization. There is an additional value-adding advantage of AnyCast DNS such as powerful analytics tools for easy access and control over your services, assisting you to observe trends in the visitor’s behavior.
We are able to cut the distance between Paris and Dakar, and we do that with style.
Dusan Stojicevic
