Managed DNS – a new DYNasty

Clear Books is pleased to announce that we have switched to a managed DNS service provided by Dyn.

DNS? What’s that? DNS, or the Domain Name System, is effectively the Internet equivalent of a telephone address book.

To continue the analogy – if Clear Books has three numbers listed in the local telephone address book then you will be able to contact Clear Books via any number.

If the first number you try doesn’t work, then you can still get through to Clear Books on one of the other two instead. In fact, you don’t even need to ring the other numbers, you will get re-directed automatically.

Well that’s what Dyn DNS allows us to do with IP addresses and servers instead of telephone numbers. So in the event of a web server failing we’ll be able to re-route you to a different server.

Switching to Dyn DNS is one of the steps Clear Books is taking to improve the reliability of our service.  Eventually it will allow us to serve traffic from multiple geographic locations, and thereby automatically failover to a different data centre in the event of an outage at one. Over the next few months we will be building out our new hosting cluster and deploying it across several UK locations.

Dyn have an IP Anycast network with 17 global datacenters around the world. They are used by some of the web’s biggest brands – twitter, 37signals, bit.ly and barracuda networks.