Invest in Your Success: Paying for Managed DNS Services for your Growing Business

invest in your success paying for managed dns services for your growing business

When your business is growing and expanding, you might find yourself trying to find solutions to grow along with it. Those free subscription solutions that helped you get on your feet are now what is holding you back – While you initially save money not having to pay for subscriptions and start-up costs, you end up spending more money managing your network or paying others to help you do so. Paying for a Managed DNS Service not only helps support your growing IP network but allows you to maximize it as well. Below are some reasons why it’s a worthy investment:

Uptime All the Time

Not only does a Managed DNS service provider help you offload the work, but a superior provider with an extensive network infrastructure will allow you to have access to 100+ Points of Presence (POPs) through Anycast. The way Anycast works is simple: If Unicast is one-to-one, Anycast is one-to-many. Anycast takes the same IP address and assigns it to multiple locations across the network. If your website is down, that means no customers can access it, and no sales can be generated. Anycast is used to help distribute traffic and query load across the entire network, so one POP isn’t always doing all of the work. Service providers like No-IP have 100 points of presence in geographically redundant locations located across the globe, and therefore help your queries get answered quickly, while also ensuring your website will experience 100% uptime. In other words, if any server is down, the user will be rerouted immediately and not experience any downtime.

SEO Impact

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how you can help your website rank higher than other websites when customers are researching queries on search engines such as Google, Bing, or Firefox to name a few. Search Engines use special algorithms that take into account things like speed, availability, and security to determine which sites should filter to the top of a search page, and which ones can fall to the bottom. A Managed DNS service not only will give your customers a good experience finding your site, but it will ensure that customers can find it online, to begin with.

Growth is Good

Never sell yourself short – You can easily go from simply starting a business to growing a business faster than you anticipate, which can be exciting, but a little nerve-racking. As more devices get added to your IP network, you will not only need a service that can help you manage the extra moving parts but one that is ready to give you plan options. There is no one size fits all scenario, especially in business. For example, you might need to add more zones or support managing different advanced records like:

  • A
  • AAAA
  • CNAME
  • Web Redirect
  • Port 80 Redirect
  • MX
  • TXT
  • SPF
  • DKIM
  • SRV
  • CAA
  • DMARC
  • PTR

As more traffic rushes to your site, you will see that the number of queries escalates to a degree you never thought possible. While this can be an exciting and auspicious business trend, there are some service providers, especially those from highly reputable companies, that tack on additional fees and charges to customers that experience this type of growth boom. Fortunately, there are other service providers like No-IP that celebrate customer growth instead of penalizing it by providing another great feature: Unlimited queries. Plus, the process of moving from a free service to a dedicated Managed DNS one is seamless, easy, and can be done with the flip of a switch.

Elite Support

Sure, you can manage your DNS yourself, or use the basic DNS that is included with your domain registration, but both of these situations will leave you frustrated and your DNS underperforming. The task of managing your own DNS server can be confusing and can leave your network vulnerable to downtime and other security issues, all while taking you away from the most important parts of your business.

Our Managed DNS service will give you something that not a lot of service providers can offer: immediate support. There is something very valuable about getting in touch with a friendly and tech-savvy Customer Success Representative to answer all your questions or help solve any of your issues. Plus, our Customer Success team has even created an extensive knowledge base and easy-to-use DNS editor that you can access and use independently whether you are a paying customer or not. When you migrate to our paid service, you are not only getting the same great customer service, but you also get higher priority. Sadly, it can take some companies days or even weeks just to receive your complaint, or respond back to you and in business, any downtime, even for a few minutes, can cost you money.

Branding

Your customer’s experience is crucial to the success of your company. Everything from the company email address to the URL they type into their computer affects how the customer perceives your business as legit and professional. The more consistent your branding is the more professional you portray your company. However, if you have a lot of nuances like random ads on redirect or different domain names in the URL, your professional front starts to decline. Paying for a unique domain for your company or paying to remove ads not only makes you look like a scaling business but also keeps your customers focused and undeterred.

As you can see, these are the ways that a great service provider like No-IP can set your business up for success. Take a look at all the customizable options that No-IP has to offer and see how you can best maximize and support your growing network.

 

Top 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Use Your Registrar’s DNS

domain names

The last thing on your mind when you register a domain and start building a new website is your website’s DNS. When you rely on your registrar’s DNS service, you are relying on a company that doesn’t necessarily specialize in managed DNS. This means you run the risk of your site going down or being slow. When that does happen, if their support team isn’t knowledgable about the DNS service, you may have a hard time getting it fixed. As they say, what is free isn’t always good, and it is important to understand all the risks you take when using your registrar’s DNS.

Check out the top 5 reasons not to use your registrar’s DNS below. Continue Reading

Master Dynamic DNS in 5 Simple Steps

master dns

Chances are you found No-IP when looking for a way to access your device remotely. Or maybe you had a friend refer you to us because you were using an expensive static IP address when all you needed was Dynamic DNS. Whatever the case may be, Dynamic DNS can seem like a complicated thing to master. But the truth is, Dynamic DNS is very simple and you can be a Dynamic DNS expert with these 5 simple steps.

1. Create A Hostname

The first step to being a master of Dynamic DNS is to sign up for a No-IP account and create an easy to remember hostname. This will be the way you connect to your device from now on, so make it short and easily identifiable. Often times, you will have more than one device you want to connect to and you can use the same name for more than one device on the same network. However, if you want to be able to distinguish which device is which, we suggest using names like, camera1.ddns.net or outsidecamera.ddns.net. Use anything that will help you remember which camera or device you are connecting to.

2. Keep A Dynamic Update Client Running

Running a Dynamic Update Client is a necessity when using Dynamic DNS. The Dynamic Update Client works by checking your IP address every 5 minutes and then, once it has changed, pushing an update to the Dynamic DNS provider to update your hostname. When your IP address changes, we connect the new address to the hostname you have attached to that device. Your device stays online and you don’t have to remember a new IP address ever again.

3. Use Your Hostname Like An IP Address

Your hostname is your new IP address. Before Dynamic DNS you could only connect to your device remotely if you knew what its current IP address was. Now, instead of entering 127.0.0.1, you just enter camera.ddns.net into whatever application you use to remotely access that device. This also means you can give family and friends access to things like your Minecraft server using an easy to remember hostname.

4. Don’t Let Your Hostname Expire

Your hostname is the key to your connection working correctly, so it is important to make sure it never expires. To do that, you will have to confirm your hostname via a link sent to your email every month. If you don’t, your hostname will expire and will be available for use by someone else. Once it expires, you will no longer be able to connect to your device using that hostname and will have to go through the process of adding a new hostname and reconfiguring your device. If you are unable or don’t want to manually update your hostname every month you can upgrade to No-IP’s Enhanced Dynamic DNS, to eliminate the need to update your hostname every 30 days. You also get additional features like the ability to create advanced records like TXT and SRV and you can create as many as 25 hostnames (and even more if you need them).

5. Use a No-IP Integrated Device

No-IP is integrated into most devices, but you may want to make sure we are enabled in a certain device before purchasing. It is a safe bet to say we are in most Netgear and Foscam devices. You will want to check, however, because if No-IP is not integrated you will need to run our Dynamic Update Client on a computer that is always on. There are workarounds like the Dynamic Update Client, but for people who are just beginning to use Dynamic DNS, we suggest using an integrated device.

Dynamic DNS is an easy to use tool that will give you the freedom to remotely access your device from anywhere. By following these 5 simple steps you can master Dynamic DNS and know you’re always connected to what is important to you.

Authoritative DNS Servers vs. Recursive DNS Servers

If you aren’t sure what DNS is, you must start at the beginning.

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What Is Dynamic DNS?

dynamic dns

Dynamic DNS can be a hard concept to understand. Trust me, I get it. If you had asked me two years ago what Dynamic DNS was, I would have said something like, “Uh Dynamic DN… What?”  Dynamic DNS is what we use to help you remotely access devices like routers, cameras, and DVRs. So how exactly do we do this? Continue Reading