DynDNS no longer offers a free service. Most nerds and many of our clients over the years have used the great free (as well as pro) services of DynDNS. Many of our clients only need the single hostname service to a single location for access to webcams at home, for example.

While there are free services like no-ip.com and zoneedit.com, the reason why DynDNS is preferred is that many devices offer only DynDNS-specific support.

So, if you’re looking for that single hostname solution to access your webcams at your office or home broadband Internet connection, hop on over to:

https://www.dlinkddns.com/

D-Link Dynamic DNS is actually powered by DynDNS and still allows for a single hostname to be registered to a unique account and email address.

This makes sense because D-Link makes a decent set of webcams and it’s an essential part of what their clients need.

So thank you to D-Link and DynDNS for this remaining free alternative!

We have seen phenomenal growth on the internet, and with it, billions of websites have been created, each with its own unique IP address through the IPv4 system. The trouble is that protocol is starting to run out of addresses. As web hosts adopt IPv6, this problem will be solved.

Each website has an assigned IPv4 address that allows them to be discovered via the DNS (Domain Name System). When a user types www.google.com, the DNS system finds the website associated with that address, and displays the website in the web browser.

When the creators of the internet first came up with the framework for how the internet would work, they created the IPv4 in the early 1980s. That system was designed to allow for over 4 billion internet, and they had no reason to think the internet would evolve into what it has become. As a result, we’ve been steadily reaching the limits of what IPv4 can do.

IPv6 supports exponentially more website address than IPv4. This is due to the use of 128-bit addresses, instead of the 32-bit addresses that IPv4 uses. IPv6 also eliminates the need for a technology known as NAT, or Network Address Translation, which became very popular in an effort to slow down the inevitable possibility of IPv4 addresses running out.

IPv6 wasn’t widely adopted by hosting providers the moment it became available because IPv6 is mostly incompatible with IPv4 due to the way each protocol handles packets (how data is transferred), and upgrading networks to IPv6 can be an expensive process, as compatible hardware must be purchased.

IPv6 has many modern security benefits built-in, including protection of packets using a technology called IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), and allows for better control of what data is exchanged with the internet.

Overall, it’s important that web hosts upgrade their technology that uses the IPv6 protocol in an effort to help the internet as a whole become more secure, and avoid the possibility of running of IPv4 addresses to assign to websites, which will limit the creation of new websites.

Earlier this week I wrote an article referring to a recent Pingdom survey of DNS records. It was discovered that over 2/3 of all websites suffer from some DNS issues. Perhaps you might be wondering just what types of problems your website might have if your DNS records aren’t correct.

One common problem that our team has been noticing is the inability of some mail system (including ours) to successfully deliver email to a domain with invalid DNS settings, specifically a domain with invalid MX records. Allow me to explain a few of those terms. First, every domain name that has email services must have a MX record setup in their DNS Zone. The DNS Zone tells other computers where your email, website and other hosted services are. MX records (Mail eXchange records) tell other mail servers where to deliver your email.

If your MX records aren’t setup correctly, you will find that you will no longer receive some or all of your email. If you are having a problem receiving email, even if this is a new issue, you should first check to ensure that your DNS zone is clean. Improperly setup MX records can work for a while, and even work with some mail providers, but over time more and more mail providers will cease delivering to your mail server.

Nerds On Site offers free DNS analysis services, and if you are hosted with us, we’ll help you fix it free of charge! Contact our team today to ensure that your DNS Zone is setup correctly!

According to a report released by Pingdom on September 9th, over 66% of all websites have potential DNS issues, and these issues can lead to your website and email being inaccessible by some or all of the Internet.

Test results from their report:

• 31% passed with flying colors, all tests ok.
• 29% passed, but with at least one warning, i.e. not necessarily an error, but some setting (or lack thereof) that could potentially cause a problem.
• 34% passed with at least one error detected, i.e. with some setting that doesn’t work or is incorrect.
• 6% had really critical errors, i.e. were completely broken in one way or another.

As you can see, a full 40% of the tests had errors of some kind in them.

Nerds On Site offers free DNS analysis reports for your website, so contact us today to get your free report! If you host with Nerds On Site, we’ll also help fix the problem for free!

On Tuesday, Nerds On Site announced our new geographically redundant DNS system, and made it a standard option for all our shared hosting clients. This is the third in a series of three articles on geographically redundant DNS, designed to answer the What, Where and Why of our new service.

You may be wondering where you can get geographically redundant DNS for your online business. All clients that are hosted with Nerds On Site are automatically protected by this service. Is your website currently protected by geographically redundant DNS? Our team will give you an absolutely free analysis of your website’s DNS service. All you have to do is email our Hosting Team, and include your website address. Our team will quickly get back to you with the results of our analysis. Click here to check your website for free!

On Tuesday, Nerds On Site announced our new geographically redundant DNS system, and made it a standard option for all our shared hosting clients. This is the second in a series of three articles on geographically redundant DNS, designed to answer the What, Where and Why of our new service.

Why is geographically redundant DNS crucial for your business? Two days ago, Media Temple (one of North America’s largest hosting provider with nearly 1 million domains under management) suffered a 2 hour and 5 minute period of downtime because of an attack on their DNS system. While MediaTemple has redundant DNS servers, their servers are not geographically redundant, making them much more susceptible to attack.

There are many types of disasters that can hit a server, such as hardware failures, power outages, network outages, hacking attempts, denial of service attacks and many others. Many of these issues will affect all servers in a single physical location, such as multiple servers in the same data center. By placing redundant servers in geographically separate places (one in Canada, one in the United States) Nerds On Site is able to prevent the widest possible array of issues, including issues that take down our competitors on a regular basis.

By hosting with Nerds On Site, and having your DNS protected by our geographically redundant system, you know that you are getting the best possible reliability for your business. Contact our team today, by phone: 1-877-MY-NERDS, or by email: http://nerdsisp.com/contact-us.html.

Yesterday, Nerds On Site launched our new geographically redundant DNS system, and made it a standard option for all our shared hosting clients. This is the first in a series of three articles on geographically redundant DNS, designed to answer the What, Where and Why of our new service.

You may be wondering just what exactly geographically redundant DNS is? First, let’s explain what DNS is. DNS stands for the ‘Domain Name System’, which is a naming system for computers, websites and any resource connected to the Internet. DNS is the system that enables your browser to find your website, and enables your clients to find your website. DNS is usually invisible; it works in the background to make the Internet work and come alive on your computer. What’s important to understand is the DNS supports your website, your FTP access, your email and any other hosted service that you have. If your DNS service fails for any reason, your website and email will immediately stop working for you and all your clients.

The majority of all hosting providers provide a single DNS system to all their hosted clients. Like many reputable hosting providers, Nerds On Site provides a redundant DNS system that creates a new level of redundancy for our clients. This means that if one DNS server fails, our redundant DNS server instantly and seamlessly takes over, ensuring that clients can still find your website and can still send emails to you.

Nerds On Site goes well beyond redundancy however, by providing geographical redundancy. This service means that our redundant DNS servers are located in another data center from our primary DNS servers. In fact, Nerds On Site has located our redundant servers in another country completely from our primary servers, thus guaranteeing that no issue can take down both servers simultaneously. This means that our clients are protected even in the event of a full data center failure, which is a service that is especially rare in the industry.

DNS is the service that ensures the world can find your business online, and if you host with Nerds On Site you’ll know that your DNS service will simply work, allowing you to immediately forget just what DNS is in the first place. Contact our team, and learn how we can increase your website’s reliability and availablility.

The Nerds On Site Hosting Team is proud to announce that we have launched our new geographically redundant DNS system, and are providing this new service absolutely free of charge to all of our hosting clients, both new and old. Our team is working hard to add this new service to every one of our existing clients, and is nearly done upgrading all hosting accounts. All new hosting accounts with Nerds On Site will automatically be protected by our new DNS service, which provides unprecedented levels of reliability and stability for all our hosting clients.

While geographically redundant DNS is not a first in the hosting industry, it is very rare, especially in the shared hosting world. Over the next few days, we will be posting a 3 part series of articles on geographically redundant DNS, answering the What, the Where and the Why. You will be able to read this series on our blog at http://nerdsonsite.com/blog/online-services/hosting, or you can subscribe to our feed at http://www.twitter.com/nerdshosting to be immediately updated as we post new articles.

Detouring your website lookups – ISP DNS Proxy

We apologize in advance that some aspects of this article contain NerdSpeak but we hope that the gist of the article is of value to you.

What is this DNS proxy all about?
DNS is fundamental to the Internet, similar to your address book or phone book. We don’t want to know all the IP addresses behind websites, so DNS does the lookup for us. Internet Service Providers have always provided this lookup service as part of their service offering, but many people and companies prefer to use alternate lookup servers such as OpenDNS or Google. Some ISPs are now intercepting their customers’ lookups, if they are using an alternate lookup server (in the form of a Proxy) and providing answers directly rather than allowing them to use these alternate lookup providers.

How do I know if my ISP detours or proxies my DNS?
OpenDNS has an article that describes this for you, and this was our result when we suspected the ISP had turned on DNS Proxy services and this verified it:

Why is this bad?
Proxying these DNS lookups is bad for us for the following reasons:

1. It prevents customer choice
2. It breaks DNS filtering features that are extremely useful for a number of reasons including customer-controlled filtering and botnet protection
3. It is a bit like a dictatorship on the Internet

Why might ISPs do this?
ISPs actually do have some legitimate reasons why they would want to do this:

1. Minimize technical support costs. Your computer’s DNS servers may be setup with one set of servers at work and they may not work at home, or vice-versa. This is when the ISP incurs technical support costs that they would rather avoid. If they proxy your DNS, then your non-compliant settings magically work, a technical support call and downtime frustration is avoided. However, this is just a band-aid and doesn’t solve the root problem.
2. Protect their customers from botnets. Although the intention is good here, having an ISP responsible for your Internet security forces them to apply a one-size-fits-all policy which has ill side effects. It’s like our government dictating what kind of grass we can grow in our yard.

What should they do instead?
Opt Out. Considering that ISPs have reasonably good reasons for doing this, just offer customers an Opt-Out option. This way, all of us that have enjoyed the features of OpenDNS and Google DNS servers can continue to enjoy them and everyone is happy.

Are there any workarounds if the ISP does not offer an Opt-Out feature?
Yes, there certainly are ways to work around this.

1. TCP vs UDP – some ISPs only proxy UDP-based DNS requests but not TCP. To find out, check this arcticle: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/208 Note, however, that switching your services to use TCP only will affect your performance and each DNS lookup will take longer.
2. VPN – A VPN connection makes your type of traffic invisible by your ISP so they cannot proxy DNS. If you have an internal DNS server that you want to use OpenDNS or Google recursively, make the VPN connection only from that server and not from your desktop. That way everyone on that network gets the benefit of the one VPN connection. Alternatively, if you make your own VPN connection, choose to NOT make it your default route (an option in VPN software) but do use the VPN’s DNS servers.

What obviously motivated this article is that we’re huge OpenDNS fans – check out how you can take advantage of what OpenDNS has to offer both in free and commercial flavours… If you have any comments, please feel free to share. Thanks to Arthur Wiebe for his input on this article.

David R in Ontario, Canada

February 22, 2010