Did you know that No-IP was an idea that was started in college by our founders? That small idea has grown into a great big idea with over 13.5 million users worldwide. We are proud to say that since 1999, we have been providing rock solid Dynamic DNS and Managed DNS , no ifs, ands, or buts.

Answer the following question for a chance to win a No-IP T-shirt or a Year of Enhanced DNS. 5 people will win. Winners will be announced on Tuesday, August 21, 2012. Leave your answer in the comments and be sure to Like this post and share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter!

What No-IP service allows you to use your own domain name on our redundant and reliable managed DNS network?

We have all heard the horror stories. Websites go down all the time, it’s not a question of if, it’s when. A 2009 Dunn & Bradstreet survey reported that 49 percent of Fortune 500 companies experience at least 1.6 hours of unplanned downtime per week. That is over 80 hours of downtime a year, not including website maintenance downtime. How would these outages affect your business and brand reputation? Do you know how much it will cost you when your website goes down?

What would cause an outage of your website though? Downtime can be caused by internal and external issues. Natural events as simple as a lightning storm, or as extreme as hurricanes and earthquakes can easily take your website down, as well as man-made events like changes to network configurations, hardware or even wiring issues. Outages can cause both short term and long term problems that not only affect lost revenue, labour costs and marketing costs, but also indirect things like lost customers, lost business opportunities, driving traffic to your competitors and irreversible brand damage.

We have all heard about the recent Amazon outage that affected major brands like Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and others. Not only was this an Amazon issue, but because of the other companies that were directly involved, it became those companies issue as well. Many customers could be found on Twitter complaining about the outages of Netflix to them directly, even though the issue wasn’t even caused by Netflix. If your customers aren’t happy, your brand isn’t happy.

So, how much does all of this downtime cost a company? It is all dependent on how much revenue and sales your company generates from your website. If you are generating $10,000 a day from your website and your website is down for a few hours, this could greatly affect your bottom line. It could be the same scenerio if you generate sales leads via your website. If customers search for your website and it is down, the first thing they are going to do is go to a search engine and find another provider.

Downtime can potentially cost your business tens of thousands of dollars a year. Why take the risk? If your website is important to you, you should really think about a Managed DNS solution. DNS is an essential part of the Internet.  If your website is hosted on web servers that are only located in one or two locations, and something happens, your entire website can be taken down. DNS that is hosted in many geographically diverse locations means that even if the unthinkable happens, your customers will still be able to reach your site.

The location of DNS servers is important in ensuring 100% uptime. No-IP deploys nameservers across the globe at geographically unique datacenters using different tier 1 bandwidth providers to ensure a natural disaster or connectivity outage does not disrupt our robust DNS network.

Remember, there are no upsides to downtime.

Have you or your business ever been affected by a DNS outage? Share your thoughts below!

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. It’s a hardware problem.

We are now a very connected population. According to a Pew study, “45% of cell phone owners said that their phone is a smartphone.” Nearly half of the cell phone users in this country are on smartphones, which means they are also accessing the Internet from their phones.

Most smartphone users access the Internet through a 3g or 4g connection from their service provider. Data can be costly though and these networks can also be slow if located in a densely populated area.  So, when there is a free WiFi network available, people typically use it. Did you know that when you are on an unsecured wireless network you can easily be hacked? Follow these tips to keep your information safe and secure while browsing on public WiFi.

1. Download a VPN app on your device. When you are on the Internet, go through the VPN. This will encrypt and secure all of your browsings. What exactly is a Virtual Private Network (VPN)?

2. Never access sensitive information over an open network without a VPN in place. Do not enter passwords and other sensitive information.

3. Turn on encryption if your phone has the option. How to turn on encryption: iPhone, Samsung Galaxy A quick search on Google for “How to encrypt data on a (your smart phone)” should return directions if your phone supports encryption.

Any other tips for safe Internet browsing via your smartphone? Leave them in the comments. Do you use a VPN app on your phone? Which one do you use?

Recently, we had a user complain on our Facebook page about not being able to share his free No-IP Hostname with his friends on Facebook. His hostname was something like gameserver.no-ip.org. Facebook thought he was posting spam.  This is one of the downsides of our No-IP Free and Enhanced service. So, why does this happen?

No-IP Free Dynamic DNS and Enhanced DNS users share roughly 50 different domains. With these services, you are relying on millions of other people doing the right thing with their hosts, which unfortunately isn’t always the case. Our service sometimes fall prey to cyberscammers and spammers. They create a hostname, and then send out spam on it. Our abuse team is amazing and they are usually pretty quick to shut them down. But because we have a history of this type of abuse on our domains, Facebook and other websites don’t like when people share our links.

So, because of a few bad  people it punishes everyone? Yup. Isn’t that life though?
There is nothing that we can really do about it either, aside from shutting down our Free and Enhanced service or simply deterring these scammers by moving to a paid model. Don’t worry though, we aren’t going to do that. Just be aware that when you are using our shared domain services, you may have trouble sharing and posting content…

Our shared domains are a great choice for someone that wants to run a small video game server, reach their computer remotely, or view a webcam over the internet, but if you are going to be using your domain for something a little more important than that like say, run a blog, website, etc, you may want to think about registering your own domain name and using the hostnames on it.   With No-IP Plus DNS, you register your very own domain (www.yourname.com or www.yourbusiness.com) and we handle the DNS for you!

If you believe the actions of one of our users violates our Terms of Service, help us out by emailing Abuse@no-ip.com.