In the Internet world, latency is a villain who kills website owners’ expectations. Every time users’ queries wait long to get a response, users abandon. All the work done inside the website to amaze them remains ignored.
Let’s fight the villain with GeoDNS!
What is GeoDNS?
GeoDNS is also called traffic director or global traffic director. It is an efficient method to optimize traffic to domains through the use of geographical-based routing. It is also a cloud-based alternative for load balancing. Its benefits positively the performance of the network.
If you own a company that delivers content worldwide, this is totally for you. GeoDNS will give you name servers strategically located in the world and an efficient process to distribute the traffic considering queries’ locations.
How GeoDNS works?
To implement GeoDNS, you need a DNS provider who supports Geolocation. Once implemented, when a user’s query is received, the DNS server will look for its location. This will be done through user’s IP. DNS will check it, and then it will look for the location in a database. Afterward, the name server will send a pre-configured record specifically defined for the region where the query came from.
Once GeoDNS knows the query’s location, it defines the route to respond better and faster.
It uses DNS GeoIP searches to send visitors to the best server choice (closest location). All servers will have different IP addresses for the same domain.
Pros of GeoDNS
- The configuration is not hard.
- Traffic management possibilities are wide and very useful. Direct your traffic to servers located in the continent where the visitors are sending the query from, just by setting up few records through the DNS control panel. Manage traffic going to a country, state, or city level.
- Clearly understanding your traffic, you can try all kinds of combinations to move it, avoiding unnecessary jams for the good of the network and conveniently for your business. As simple or complicated as you want.
- Speed, uptime, loading time, and fast query response definitely will improve. Happy visitors, better SEO.
- Easier maintenance without affecting users. You can take a server out by simply dropping its IP (A DNS record) or by directing them to a different server. Just wait for TTL to expire and traffic to drop. That’s it!
- Geo-restricted content won’t be a problem anymore. Through your DNS panel, direct users to the server that is convenient for your plan, strategy, etc. Or go opposite. If it is convenient not to give them such an alternative, they won’t have it.
- Monitoring is easy.
- Proficiency in managing GeoDNS possibilities can lead you to reduce latency just like Anycast or better.
Cons of GeoDNS
- It is not cheap. It is a solution for international businesses that can afford it and get the best out of it.
- GeoIP is a key element for GeoDNS’s process. It is not rare GeoIP databases are not updated regularly. Due to the old info, the users might have changed their IPs.
- Privacy matters more every day, and its defense could be a future issue for this tech. If IPs keep inaccessible, GeoIP and therefore Geo DNS routing accuracy would be affected.
- To add more servers via DNS is a possible but not super simple task. The design of the routing configuration requires time and knowledge to be accurate. In this case, Anycast seems better since it already works on the base of multiple name server networks worlwide distributed.
Conclusion
GeoDNS is a big opportunity for your international business to succeed and continue expanding with proper infrastructure to satisfy your expectations and go far beyond. Give GeoDNS a try. You won’t regret it!