How ClouDNS Built a Secure, High-Performance Enterprise DNS Solution That Guarantees Optimal Uptime Rates and Affordability

TL; DR: The DNS hosting marketplace is crowded with a mix of both established companies and a growing field of upstarts fighting for new customers. ClouDNS, founded in 2010, has managed to grow rapidly in this competitive space. The host has experienced such steady growth by offering a variety of powerful services at affordable price points. Today, ClouDNS has established itself as a fast, efficient, and high-value solution, with customers on almost every continent and a network that processes more than 2 billion queries each day.

As eCommerce has expanded globally, the need for Domain Name System (DNS) hosting has also increased. These hosts are critical to user experience, as they help quickly route domain name traffic to the correct IP addresses all over the world. Without a DNS host, a website visitor’s page load time can increase significantly, meaning they may leave — or bounce from — a site immediately.

A high bounce rate can mean lost customers, missed conversions, and negative ROI, and the metric is hard enough to manage without adding in slow loading times.

While many DNS hosting companies have been founded in the last decade to serve this growing need, few have experienced the success of ClouDNS.

The company was founded in 2010 with four datacenters and five servers. In 2011, ClouDNS hired its first employees and added two additional datacenters and servers. And, as it gained more clients around the globe, the company continued to make its service more powerful.

Over the next three years, it added its first server in Asia, launched an affiliate program, built a Wiki of helpful articles, and gave HTTP functionality to domain resellers — all in addition to developing new features and upgrading its service.

By the company’s sixth birthday in 2016, ClouDNS had deployed a DDoS Protected and Anycast DNS Network and maintained server locations around the world — including locations in Germany, Canada, Brazil, and South Africa. That global presence allows its clients to experience optimal uptime rates and deliver experiences quickly.

Today, ClouDNS serves customers in more than 6,200 cities in 186 countries — on every continent except Antarctica. Its premium services include a cloud-based infrastructure, 24/7 support, and guarantee up to 10,000% uptime. That means the company will extend a client’s service agreement by 100 free minutes for every minute its website is down. And the company’s GeoDNS, which helps boost performance internationally, is DDoS-protected and gives its users multiple geolocation target options.

Growing online businesses that need responsive service at a reasonable price often turn to ClouDNS to realize higher returns on their investments. That’s why the DNS host now manages hundreds of thousands of customer domains and handles more than 2 billion internet queries every day.

Entrepreneurs need their business websites to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s why they often seek a secondary DNS service partner. Whether they’re trying to build a customer base in a hyper-competitive marketplace or needing to maintain availability for clients who have a constant stream of questions, a secondary DNS service can keep their webpage online and customers satisfied.

ClouDNS’ secondary DNS distributes traffic to two providers, providing both resiliency and redundancy. Users manage their domain’s records at the primary DNS provider, while the secondary DNS is automatically updated and synced. If the primary DNS ever becomes unavailable, traffic is instantly redirected to the secondary provider — without a customer ever knowing that anything went wrong. The secondary DNS keeps copies of all records, so, if the worst-case scenario happens and primary data is lost, a back-up is prepared and ready to go.

In addition, ClouDNS makes it easy to migrate from a self-hosted DNS to new systems — including DDoS Protected — all without changing management systems, access, or control panels.

ClouDNS built its own cloud infrastructure that allows users to monitor DNS status at each location in real time. That security is more important than ever considering that DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. ClouDNS’ in-house experts developed proprietary DDoS protection, which all of its Secondary DNS customers can access.

Today, most customers are accustomed to online shopping, even visiting the web to order everyday items. But even those who aren’t looking to buy consumer goods go online to research industries, services, and companies before they make decisions about purchases. Consumers are continually searching for information about products and services, whether it is choosing the plumber they’ll hire to fix a leaky faucet or the accounting firm they’ll use to support their small business. In this environment, being offline for any amount of time can mean losing customers, revenue, and growth. That’s why eCommerce businesses rely on Secondary DNS to keep their websites accessible.

Businesses that need their sites to run with maximum speed and efficiency should also consider using an Anycast DNS service. The service sends queries to multiple locations in different geographic areas, so every visitor is automatically sent on the shortest and quickest path.

ClouDNS’ Premium Anycast DNS service maximizes speed, minimizes downtime, and reduces latency across every continent. It uses 23 points-of-presence (POPs) that evenly distribute queries by considering their geographical source and each server’s load. Each POP uses real hardware, making response time almost instantaneous. They also have global and local route monitoring systems that reroute queries through low latency locations. Finally, ClouDNS’ autonomous system issues responses within 15 seconds. Those advanced features help provide visitors with a fast, smooth user experience.

Of course, if a website is down, speed doesn’t matter. That’s why ClouDNS has made sure that its Anycast DNS service is safe, stable, and reliable. Because its network includes multiple servers dispersed throughout the world, all traffic is rerouted away from POPs that are suffering from any slow-downs, hiccups, or crashes. The system also has multiple DDoS protection providers to quickly neutralize attacks and minimize the risk of downtime. Those DDoS services add a layer of security to clean out malicious traffic before it can even access the network.

The Anycast DNS network’s speed and reliability make it a formidable service for any entrepreneur doing business globally — and its price point makes it accessible. With a full dual stack network and both IPv4 and IPv6 available at each POP, ClouDNS aims to provide the highest service level possible.

Whether small or large, businesses that want to transact internationally need to be responsive to web users. Downtime and delays can mean lost revenue and loyalty, which is why so many companies choose ClouDNS to do the heavy lifting in providing a seamless user experience from the domain level.

ClouDNS’ Anycast DNS network has 23 datacenters and servers dispersed all over the world so visitors can have the fast load times they expect — and never notice. And Anycast DNS is priced for scalability, as ClouDNS doesn’t charge based on the number of queries received each month. The service has no query limits, which means that if a website sees a spike in customers, the business won’t be slammed with a massive bill at the end of the month.

Anycast DNS includes a web-based control panel that shows what’s happening at every datacenter in real time. And it doesn’t just provide DDoS protection for bandwidth-based attacks; it also offers protection for DNS query floods. The ClouDNS team has developed in-house security measures that mitigate attacks.

While a variety of customers use the Anycast DNS Network, many are hosting providers, data centers, and web studios. These are the kind of tech-savvy entrepreneurs who understand high-quality, high-value service. And they’re customers that keep coming back to ClouDNS.

Whether they’re using the Enterprise, Anycast, or Secondary DNS network, they’ve come to expect fast and reliable services. In fact, many customers have reached out to praise the ClouDNS team. Christopher Nofal, Manager of DreamLab, said that ClouDNS’ “customer support, pricing, and features are top notch.” And Helinton Dias at CloudExperts Consultoria said the service “just works great.”

Because ClouDNS offers responsive and reliable products that customers love, its rapid growth shouldn’t be any mystery.