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I am currently developing a project which is mission-critical. The actual domain name is registered with 1 & 1 and I plan on purchasing DynDNS Custom DNS service (which has 5 different geographical locations for DNS) and then another secondary DNS service to make sure my DNS is as failover safe as possible. Does it matter that the registration is with 1 & 1 - are they a weak link in the chain? All I really use them for is to say that DynDNS is my primary DNS nameserver and then my secondary DNS is my other nameserver.

I can transfer the registration to DynDNS - Im just not sure if it really matters or not.

Thanks

sebix
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user35204
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6 Answers6

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Your registrar is, IMHO, the least of your concerns. Your actual DNS provider (the folks who host your nameserver) is probably worth a little consideration, but it's still down in the noise compared to the rest of what you need to do to really reach 99.9999% availability.

Six Nines availability (99.9999) means less than 1 hour minute (actually exactly 31.536 seconds) of downtime in a year. If you're really intending to reach that level of availability and not just blowing smoke you should be concentrating more on your (distributed, redundant) network & server infrastructure, and at that point you can really host your own DNS servers in your multiple (geographically and topologically distributed) datacenters :-)

Just my $3.50...

voretaq7
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Is it your goal to reach 6 nines of uptime or is someone else mandating it to you? If it's your goal, then it's admirable but unrealistic, improbable, and next to impossible.

If it's being mandated to you then the entity that has made the mandate is woefully unaware of what it really means, what it would cost to achieve, and is likely just regurgitating some pablum they heard or read somewhere.

joeqwerty
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If you're worrying about your dns/registrar instead of your 4 redundant data centers, your 8 redundant ISPs (two different pipes at each datacenter), and your trans-continental clustering failover hardware/software solution, you're looking in the wrong place.

Six nines is basically impossible. You can be down for no more than 30 seconds each year. 30 seconds! If it takes you 10 minutes to failover after a catastrophe, you've blown your 6 nines average for TWENTY YEARS.

Chances are, you're not going to be spending enough to make 6 nines realistic. It costs more than it's worth.

Satanicpuppy
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Six nines of uptime? Well, to begin with that's gonna cost you. Is your application really so critical that 30 seconds of downtime a year will kill you? (Hint: Most medical equipment doesn't aim for 6 nines. Google certainly does not etc.)

The registrar doesn't have a big effect on your availability. They are just the link between you and the administration of the root servers, and you typically don't have to modify your entries at the root servers often. If you are to reach 6 nines you have a lot of much larger engineering problems than that to solve.

pehrs
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The domain name registrar will not affect the availability of your domain.

There is substantial architecture that is necessary to reach "6 nines" availability. You will not insure that level of availability by simply having multiple DNS providers.

Warner
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Even Google and Amazon haven't met six nines in the last year. Unless you're VISA or something, it's time to drop your expectations to something a little more reasonable.

ceejayoz
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