eScrubber DNS Services

The most problematic and confusing area of operating a Internet site is DNS. The statistics are bleak. More than half of all the DNS servers in the world are misconfigured in some way. This leads to reliability issues - customers not being able to reach your Web site or communicate with you via E-mail. If the reliability of your Internet site is important to you, you need to put control of your DNS in better hands. eScrubber provides solutions for many DNS issues.

eScrubber operates a network of DNS servers to ensure your DNS is running even during Internet outages. You can choose to have us handle all of your DNS or provide a la carte services - you choose. Contact us for details.

Uptime Guarantee

eScrubber guarantees 99.999% uptime of your DNS service as long as two or more eScrubber servers as listed as being authoritative for your zone. This is measured on a monthly basis and results in a maximum downtime of 25.9 seconds per month. A credit equal to 1/20th of your monthly charges for every 5 minutes of service downtime, but not to exceed the monthly fee, is issued if that guarantee cannot be met. Note that eScrubber has never experienced such an outage.

Notification

eScrubber will monitor your zones and notify you via email when significant failures occur. Significant failures are:

1. You're using the eScrubber DNS Master service and only one server is answering queries for more than 5 minutes.
2. You're using the eScrubber DNS Slave service and your master/primary DNS server stops answering queries for more than 5 minutes.
3. No servers are answering queries. The notification is sent immediately and can be sent to additional or different email addresses than the ones above.

All downtime (of any server) is recorded and is available to you on the eScrubber Web site.

Web Server Fault-tolerance

There are many reasons why your Web site may suddenly become unavailable to the Internet. Your Web server could fail, your DNS server could fail, or you could lose your Internet connection. You don't want people trying to browse your site to see blank screens or browser error messages.

eScrubber provides you with fault-tolerant DNS. When it sees that your Web server is not available to the Internet, it automatically begins answering DNS queries with the address of a backup Web server that you control. This Web server could serve the identical content as your main Web server, partial content, or it could simply explain that your main Web site is down.

This requires that the eScrubber server be one of the authority servers for your domain (zone).

ISP DNS Proxies

Several of the larger ISPs now run DNS proxies that intercept your DNS packets and provide answers from their local caches. This creates a few problems:

1. ISP DNS caches are frequently overutilized and don't perform well. It takes longer to get an answer from their cache.
2. Some ISPs do not answer queries for the major DNS block list servers. They block the block lists. If you run a mail server in-house and you want to use the DNS block list providers, you won't be able to; your spam volume will increase.
3. ISP DNS caches are configured to only resolve ICANN-controlled names. You won't be able to resolve any DNS names outside of the name space controlled by the ICANN monopoly - you won't have access to all of the Internet.

There may be other problems as well. If you can't switch to another ISP to escape this tyranny, you can tunnel your DNS packets past your ISP's proxy to our servers. Contact us for details.

Training

DNS training courses are available from our sister company, the Accelerated Learning Center.