Ask HN: How to mitigate DNS provider issues?

4 points

15 years ago

I had several sites become inaccessible yesterday due to the DDOS on Namecheap's DNS servers: http://status.namecheap.com/?p=3739

Everything appears to be back to normal for us right now, but this has definitely rattled us a bit. We've never had problems with Namecheap before. Admittedly, DNS / Nameserver routing is not something I have a lot of expertise in. Like many developers/ dev ops people, DNS is something I set once and mostly leave alone. I had not considered it a vector for failure.

Several question:

1) What are the best practices in mitigating something un-forseen like a DDOS attack on your DNS / Nameserver provider? It seems like redundancy is the only good option, since any provider we go with could get DDOS-ed. What are good redundancy setups?

2) I've heard people say 'don't do DNS with your registrar'. But I'm not clear on exactly why not. Are registrars just inherently worse at DNS & nameserving?

3) Out of curiosity, does anyone know why Namecheap was DDOS-ed? Was it just for the lolz?

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