Poor website performance has a direct impact on revenue. Even just a few seconds of delay on an ecommerce website can lead to shopping cart abandonment and a decline in the conversion rate. DNS (Domain Name System) allows users to find and connect to websites, and can be a hidden source of latency.
What is DNS and how does it work?
DNS maintains a catalog of domain names, such as “internap.com”, and resolves them into IP addresses. Anyone that has a presence online uses DNS – it’s required in order to access websites.
Sample use case: Ecommerce
Let’s look at a growing ecommerce site that recently expanded into a new market in Europe. Following the expansion, the company noticed that users were experiencing unacceptable levels of latency while connecting to their site. During the past month, users had to wait up to 10 minutes before they were able to reach the site.
The company has been handling their DNS needs through their ISP until this point. Possible causes of such high latency include:
- DNS name servers may not be in close geographic proximity to a large percentage of users, and routing table errors could be misdirecting requests to name servers that are physically far away from the user.
- Network congestion may contribute to slow resolution of DNS queries, resulting in high wait times to connect to the site.
- Poor performance can also be caused by hardware failure at one of the name server nodes, and without an active DNS failover in place, this can keep some users from accessing the site.
To prevent these issues from affecting your business, we recommend a Managed DNS Service to support the performance needs of today’s websites.
In our presentation, DNS: An Overlooked Source of Latency, you will learn:
- Factors that affect webpage load times
- Important DNS features and functions
- Different types of DNS solutions available
View the presentation here.
