Leaseweb Anycast DNS: What it is and how to use it

With Leaseweb’s Anycast DNS, you get it all. It’s a highly available, reliable, resilient and low latency Domain Name System (DNS).

Leaseweb’s Anycast DNS is designed to give businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end-users to Internet applications by translating domain names (e.g. www.leaseweb.com) into numeric IP addresses (e.g. 185.28.68.130) that computers use to connect to each other. It lets you publish your zones and records in the DNS without the heavy responsibility of managing your own DNS servers and software.

 

How does name resolution in DNS work?

First, a recursive resolver (aka DNS recursor) receives a query and looks in its cache for the answer. If the answer is not found, the recursive resolver sends a request to the root server to get a nameserver for the TLD, which contains information on the nameservers for its subdomains. When requested, the TLD nameserver answers with the address of the authoritative nameserver.

The authoritative nameserver is usually the resolver’s last step in the journey for an IP address. The authoritative nameserver contains information specific to the domain name it serves and can provide a recursive resolver with the IP address of that server found in the DNS A record.

At this point, the recursive resolver must perform an entirely new DNS lookup to procure a record from an authoritative nameserver (often an A record containing an IP address).

What are the benefits of Leaseweb Anycast DNS?

The Leaseweb DNS distributes authoritative nameservers that come with anycast routing to make them more reliable.

Highly Available and Reliable

The Leaseweb Anycast DNS is a highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS infrastructure ensures the consistent ability to route your end users to your application.

Flexible and Fast

The Leaseweb Anycast DNS uses our global network of anycast name servers to serve your DNS zones from redundant locations around the world, providing high availability and lower latency for your users. It was designed to automatically route your users to the most optimal location. DNS Traffic Flow routes traffic based on criteria such as geographic location and latency.

The Leaseweb Anycast DNS Traffic Flow lets you further improve your customers’ experience by running your application in multiple locations worldwide and using routing policies to ensure your end users are routed to the closest location for your application.

Security and Load Balancing

In the event of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against DNS servers, anycast routing will weaken the attack’s effect by distributing the attack traffic across the entire network.

In addition, load balance DNS queries over equal cost route paths, allowing you to redirect your customers to specific IPs (servers) based on their geographic location. This provides you with a Global Traffic Management (GTM) utility.

Additional DNS Feature: Traffic Policy

If your application is hosted in multiple locations, you can improve performance for your users by serving their requests from the closest location. This feature uses GeoIP databases to find indications of the geographical location of the requester and the listed IP addresses. It will identify and return the closest one (shortest latency) among all the specified IP addresses.

How to find the Traffic Policy in the Customer Portal:

1. In the Customer Portal menu, select Hosting, and then Domain, Hosting & Email.

2. You will be redirected to the Hosting Overview page.

3. Click on the DNS Records list page for a particular domain.

4. Click on the Traffic Policy tab.

 

For more information, see our Anycast DNS.

 

Read more:

Local DNS-anycast, SIDN’s revolutionary new approach in response to the DDoS rat race