My Customers require 100% uptime and I have managed to achieve this for them to date by hosting one site in the US data center and a duplicate site in the UK data center. The DNS failure today caught me out and I have now realized that the DiscountASP.Net name servers may be a single point of failure. Is that correct and is there any way to overcome this problem?
That is correct. In theory that's why we all use two or three (or more) name servers, to avoid a failure on one affecting all traffic. But as we saw yesterday, that system isn't foolproof. The DNS system in general isn't foolproof, but it works for most of us most of the time. You can run your own DNS on a separate service and be independent of the DiscountASP.NET name servers, but then you're exposed to problems on that other service. 100% uptime is possible, but it's also expensive and complicated. The biggest, most expensive services on earth still fail (hello Azure, hello Amazon). 100% uptime involves spreading your site/application/whatever across multiple redundant systems so you aren't affected by the failure of any single one.
I use Dyn for DNS and they are very reliable, so if I let them handle DNS for one of my domains, will I need a dedicated IP address from you guys in order for DNS to work?
No you don't need a dedicated IP address to use your own DNS service provider. By default our system assigns you a shared IP number of the web server. You can use that IP number to point your A record to our web server. Your IP number won't change unless you do any of the following: 1. Migrate your site account to a new web server. 2. You order an SSL Certificate add-on service or order a Unlimited subdomain name add-on service. This will provide the hosting account with a dedicated IP address.
Thanks - that's good. I am thinking of using an IP address instead of the discountasp.net domain name in my SQL connection strings. Can you confirm the correct IP address to use for sql2k1201 is 96.31.33.42 and that it never changes?
The IP address is correct, but I'm afraid we can't guarantee that it will never change in the future. For the most part, it won't change.
