Tag: DNS

New Features to Test How DNS Caching Affects Your Website

The new DNS caching features at Dotcom-Monitor allow you to perform some interesting tests that show how DNS caching can affect your page load speed.

We realize that many organizations monitor their online services with a number different goals in mind, and so we listened to the feedback we received that some users want to include the DNS response time in their monitoring and some users want to be able to remove DNS response from their monitors.

How you wish to handle DNS response time in regard to your monitoring needs is up to you, but we want to take this opportunity to show the differences in how DNS response time affects website load using our new tools.

We ran a test monitoring YouTube from a single location in the midwest United States with three different DNS cache settings. A basic HTTP full page load on the YouTube front page resulted in some interesting, although not that surprising results.

Keep in mind the results will vary depending upon a number of variables such as which locations you are monitoring from, the time of day, the load on the DNS servers, and on the website servers.

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A Tale of Monitoring DNS Blacklists

For George, the clean-up is just beginning. He is not even yet aware that his domain is blacklisted. All he knows is that he can’t send out additional emails, the update email on the company party that evening is now a fire-drill, and his boss is giving the system administrator and him the stink eye. The problem of not knowing for hours that your site has appeared on a DNS Blacklist (DNSBL) and that email—and, even worse, potentially website visitors—are being rejected is a problem with both primary impacts and multiple secondary impacts.

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Akamai DNS Outage – Akamai Technologies Goes Down Many Clients Offline

Aug. 1, 2013 – Dotcom-Monitor tracked an Akamai DNS outage today.

Dotcom-Monitor clients that utilize Akamai may have received error messages associated with the Akamai DNS outage lasting from 5-7 minutes starting at approximately 11:01 am CDT.

The Akamai DNS outage, though brief, is only one of several high-profile DNS outage issues that has occurred in the past year. In the recent past, Dotcom-Monitor has detected several high-profile DNS outages for its clients, including…

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Vimeo Website Down – Dotcom-Monitor Verified Vimeo Website Outage

Vimeo Website Down – At approximately 1:30pm CST on 01/16/2013 Dotcom-Monitor began sending alerts to its clients regarding Vimeo webpage elements timing out. Vimeo, is a U.S.-based video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and view videos. Dotcom-Monitor testing verified intermittent connection Vimeo outages occurring from worldwide locations. Dotcom-Monitor captured a video of the Vimeo outage homepage error (note the 5-second domain name server (DNS) load time) using its UserView Monitoring – Video Capture Technology.

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Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 2 – DNS & HTML

The big day came and you had the high ground, your website was great, you even had some good, cheap monitoring in place, but oops…it turns out that monitoring was a little too cheap. It turns out your “hey, this is cheap” website monitoring service cached the Domain Name Server (DNS) process. You had a DNS issue and you didn’t know it …but your customers did.

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