It is with great personal satisfaction that I have spotted that Amazon.com's DNS entry was now pointing to UltraDNS servers (like softtechvc.com, linkedin.com, and 8000 other companies and 26 TLDs). The press release just came out, announcing that Amazon had selected UltraDNS to optimize its Web site infrastructure.
Why is DNS important ? Because, as most of you know, it is like the door knob to an Internet presence. If it does not work, you can't get in your web site (the famous error 404 that you get when a browser can't reach a page) or receive emails. Unfortunately this happens more often than one would like to think: DDOS attacks, operational errors, and simple mistakes lead to unavailability of Internet resources for minutes, hours or even days (in the worst case, it can take up to 48 hours to update one's DNS entry on all Internet name servers).
This is why so many companies have turned to UltraDNS, which has developed its own fully distributed implementation of the DNS, to outsource the management of the issue. Developing and maintaining a custom DNS infrastructure to provide performance, fault tolerance and load balancing is complex and expensive, especially for web properties that require 100% uptime. UltraDNS Managed DNS service, and the related product suite (like Mail MXBacker that stores all incoming email for the time the server listed in your MX record is not accessible - very useful when your email provider is under DDOS attack) provide a simple yet very powerful solution. They ought to be considered by companies of all sizes, to help dealing with a range of requirements like smoothly switching email or hosting providers or implementing elements of large corporate Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery plans.
Enough said: Congratulations to Ben, Rodney and the team, and go check out UltraDNS' offering. You can even register online ;-).
Full Disclosure: We at RVC led UltraDNS' Series B 4 years ago, and I have had the privilege of being a board member of the company since then. Upon my leaving RVC and starting SoftTech VC, UltraDNS became one of my first clients.
Just got a call from the sales team at UltraDNS. I don't know how they got our name. Maybe because Blogsome is moving up throught the Alexa rankings into the below 10,000 range. Jennifer from sales was telling me they work with all the "giants". She wasn't too impressed that our DNS was only in 2 continents. Anyway it's great to be keeping company with the likes of Amazon.
Posted by: Roger | July 25, 2005 at 09:12 AM