The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the internet's most important components and you can think of it as the internet's phone book. While it's easier for us to remember domain names, computers and machines rely on IP addresses to determine where each website is located. The basic job of the DNS is to translate the domain names that we all know and love, into IP addresses that our browsers can understand.
With an unparalleled presence inside Canada and close to major population hubs across North America, Webnames Anycast DNS amplifies the performance and speed of your DNS infrastructure, while also increasing its resilience against DDoS attacks.
DNS Attacks are on the rise.
Plan ahead, protect your business with Canada's most powerful secondary DNS service.
Small Business
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1 Million Queries Monthly
Growth
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5 Million Queries Monthly
Volume
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10 Million Queries Monthly
All Anycast plans include:
- 20+ Nodes
- 100% uptime SLA
- Anycast DNS management panel
- 2 Anycast clouds
- 24-hour monitoring
- Setup and configuration support
- IPv6, DNSSEC & TSIG support
- Phone & email support, 7 days/week
Don’t know how many DNS queries your website and applications generate?
That’s okay! Simply sign up for any Anycast plan and Webnames will monitor your DNS volume. If you consistently exceed your query limits, we’ll work with you to determine a better plan for your needs. Webnames does not charge overage fees for temporary spikes in DNS traffic due to events such as a successful promotion or even a full DDoS attack.
Need support for 50+ million queries? Book a consult or call 1-866-976-9835.
Anycast DNS Features
Prevent DDoS attacks that could take your organization offline before they happen.
Exceptionally Reliable
8 high capacity nodes run coast to coast in Canada, plus 12 more situated worldwide with excellent proximity to major Internet Exchange Points.
Fortified Redundancy
Two Anycast clouds - each with independent hardware, multiple transit providers, and a direct connection to a well peered IXP- provide a formidable second layer of redundancy.
100% Managed & Monitored
Canada-based network with Canadian DNS experts actively monitoring Anycast 24/7 to mitigate threats and attacks.
DDoS Protected
Distributed nodes and multiple clouds isolate threats to the nearest nameserver, so attacks originating outside of Canada are confined to international nodes.
Architected for Speed
Anycast automatically routes your visitors to the closest nameserver, amplifying speed and reducing latency...with 8 Canadian nodes in play, homegrown traffic moves exceptionally fast.
Support You Can Count On
100% uptime SLA 7-days/week phone and email Support by in-house pros you already know and trust. 24×7 Support for Managed Services clients.
Anycast DNS Resource Centre
We're conditioned to take DNS for granted. It operates unseen in the background, doing its thing without much fuss or maintenance — until something happens, impacting your business critical operations and reputation.
Businesses today run increasingly complex websites, leverage numerous web applications and are more prone to DDoS attacks than ever before. Proactive IT departments are responding by taking additional precautions to protect their web properties and nameservers, including upgrading to secondary Anycast DNS.
Looking for a corporate DNS service? Consider our Enterprise DNS solutions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Each domain name is assigned a single IP address and two DNS servers, also known as a nameserver. Combined, these two groups work together to provide visitors trying to access your website the IP address.
For example, if you type in www.webnames.ca, your browser queries the DNS to find our nameservers (ns1.webnames.ca and ns2.webnames.ca). Once the nameservers receive your query, it communicates with your browser to let it know the IP address of our website.
Standard DNS leverages Unicast DNS infrastructure - a single nameserver cluster is assigned to an IP address and provides routing information to all traffic requests. In most cases, this is enough for low-to-medium traffic websites, but offers little in the way of infrastructure enhancements and protection.
On the other hand, Webnames.ca’s Anycast DNS services expands on a unicast system by geographically distributing copies of your nameserver around the world, while limiting access via a single IP address. Through Anycast routing methods, visitors are automatically redirected to the fastest and closest DNS server to provide increased fault tolerance and robust performance.
The Anycast DNS service provides three important benefits: performance, speed and resiliency against DNS-based DDoS attacks.
Better Performance
The globally dispersed nature of an Anycast DNS infrastructure ensures that copies of your nameserver are available at all times. If a nameserver on the network fails, it is automatically removed from the routing path and all traffic is redirected to the best alternate path on the network.
Faster Speed
The geographically dispersed nature of Anycast DNS allows the network to identify where each traffic request originates from and automatically routes them to the nearest nameserver on the network. This ensures that all visitors have a consistent user experience and quick access to your website.
Increased Resiliency Against DDoS Attacks
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks typically use botnets – compromised computers around the world – to generate a large number of traffic requests to a single IP address. On a Unicast infrastructure, the sheer volume of requests can easily overwhelm it and take it down. However, the global DNS network created by Anycast allows it to soak up attacks and localize damage to a small portion of the DNS network.
To determine which Anycast plan is right for your business needs, you will need to calculate the approximate total of DNS queries generated by visits to your website, email traffic and API calls from your various web applications. Your current name server administrator will have this information.
Webnames' Anycast Candian nameservers are located in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver. This is in addition to a global footprint in Los Angeles, Miami, London, Hong Kong, Stockholm and peering to over 2,300 networks.
The global DNS network created by Anycast allows the DNS system to have more bandwidth and capacity than a unicast DNS system. With Anycast DNS, the impact of an attack is isolated to the nameserver closest to the source(s) of the attack.
Additionally, the inherent architecture of Anycast DNS provides redundancy at the nodes and with a primary and secondary cloud to further mitigate the impact of DNS-based DDoS attacks. The net result is that DNS-based DDoS attacks that originate outside of Canada are soaked up by the international nodes to reduce the risk that hackers can bring down your website and services. On the other hand, DNS-based DDoS attacks that originate within Canada are soaked up by the local node(s) to protect the rest of your Canadian traffic.
After you purchase Anycast DNS for a domain name you will:
- Define the name server from which Anycast DNS will sync DNS records from (i.e. define the authoritative source of DNS records for your domain)
- Configure a trust between authoritative source name server and the Anycast service so that DNS records can be exchanged and synchronized
- Apply the Anycast name servers to your domain name
View our Anycast DNS set-up documentation.