Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi Paul

I think I know what they`re talking about. When you surf to a website using a name (like www.startupnation.com) your local computer uses a domain name server (DNS server) to turn the name into an IP address. If your local DNS server doesn`t immediately know the answer then it tracks down the DNS server that does. What it gets back are two things:

1. The IP address
2. How long it can continue using the result without going back to the server that knows the answer (this reduces traffic).

Because your local DNS server can cache the result it`s possible to get into a situation where their DNS server is saying one thing and your one  saying something else. This continues until your DNS server realises it`s time to lookup the address again. The end result is they appear to drop off the Internet until the change propogates across the Internet.

While there are a few reasons why this could happen it requires a bit of miss management to make it happen.


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Blog - http://www.buggy.id.au/

Richard,

Thanks for your post. You hit the nail on the head.

We have multiple vendors who provide DNS services for our worldwide network. Unfortunately one of them experienced a failure which caught us completely off guard. We reacted to the circumstance immediately but it can take anywhere from 24 - 76 hours for the new IP addresses to propagate. We have since fired that vendor, brought the DNS services in house, and added redundancy.

It is true that some, but not all, of our customers experienced delays in accessing our site and their AppShore application as a result of this failure. Paul happened to be one of the unfortunate ones.

I completely understand Paul`s, and other customers` frustration. However, since coming online in early 2004 we have had an exceptional record of high availability. In fact we had not had a single second of downtime prior to this incident.

Despite the vendors best efforts, every online application experiences downtime at some time or another. Even the big guys like Yahoo and Google have had problems in this area. In fact, our record is much better than our main competitor salesforce.com, which is a $300 million, public traded company.

Salesforce.com downtime issues
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39247732,00.ht m
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2513
http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39156088 ,00.htm
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3572756
http://searchsmb.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid 44_gci1154481,00.html

Google downtime issues
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20051103Pla netEarthNotesGoogleDowntime.html
http://www.dvhardware.net/article4853.html

By the way, Paul has not canceled his subscription to AppShore.

Regards,
Kregg