Question
How does DNS infrastructure of Openprovider work?
Answer
DNS management is a service that is available free of charge to Openprovider customers. One can decide to what extent to use Openprovider nameservers:
- as master nameservers
- as slave nameservers
Geographically separated
Openprovider operates domain name servers from geographically separated locations (Ireland, United Kingdom and Germany), in separate subnets, using hardware of the highest quality. This allows the system to recover immediately if any failures occur, ensuring that your web sites and email continue operating.
Service level agreement
The use of the free Openprovider nameservers comes without service level agreement (SLA). Openprovider does its best to keep the services up at any moment, but a maximum downtime cannot be guaranteed.
Attacks on nameservers (DDoS)
A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) happens when thousands of queries per second are executed (usually from different IP-addresses) on 1 domain name. When the amount of queries are higher than the capacity to process those queries and the requests keep coming, the availability of the nameservers may be affected.
Every system which will process queries could be affected by a DDoS attack. This can not be fully prevented by the administrator of the service. More information about DDoS attacks can be found here.
Precautions to prevent those attacks
Although Openprovider can not fully prevent DDoS attacks, several precautions have been taken to reduce the risks.
To prevent those attacks a fair limit on the number of queries per second per IP address have been placed. This limit will is reviewed on a regular basis.
If the monitoring service detects more queries that are allowed from 1 IP address, those queries will be banned in order to prevent possible problems.
