Do you have a global audience? Do you need to provide country-specific content for your visitors? If that is the case, and you are getting traffic from all around the world, the best way to manage it is with GeoDNS.
What is GeoDNS?
The GeoDNS service builds on top of the traditional DNS by adding the Geo aspect. A traditional DNS resolve domain names to IP addresses, and the GeoDNS does it but by analyzing the IP addresses of the visitors, and redirecting them to the IP address, that best suits them.
Imagine you have a site that is visited from all around the world, and you have GeoDNS servers in Mexico, the US, Germany, China, and South Africa.
If a visitor from Spain requests the IP address of your domain, his or her query will be answered from the German server and redirected to the IP address it offers.
The visitor from Mexico will get connected to the Mexican server and will be redirected very fast.
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The Purposes of GeoDNS
Increase the DNS resolution speed
The main purpose of GeoDNS is to speed up your DNS resolution. There are 2 aspects of the increased speed of GeoDNS.
Having more servers strategically distributed around the world means you will be closer to your visitors. The proximity to get faster DNS resolving.
Not only that, but the GeoDNS servers can check the visitors’ IP addresses and redirect them to the closest web host. If you combine it with multiple web hosts and create CDN (Content Delivery Network), you can massively increase the speed!
Target your visitors
Use the IP address information, and target the visitors. Use the data about the origin of the DNS queries and redirect the traffic based on the continent, country, or region.
Provide country-specific content
The video platforms like Netflix use services like GeoDNS to offer exclusive country-specific content. For example, you can provide different video libraries in the US compared to Germany. The purpose of GeoDNS here is to limit access to content based on the IP address of the visitors.
Scale up or down
Depending on your provider, you could have plenty of resources at your disposal. You can start using multiple GeoDNS servers and get excellent results.
Don’t forget that with time, your business can change. You could lose a market and gain another. So it is really useful if you can add and remove new DNS servers fast and easily.
Balance the load
If you have multiple GeoDNS servers, each of them will get a part of the DNS traffic. That way, no single DNS server will get overwhelmed with work. Depending on your DNS provider, you can also have different load-balancing options.
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Conclusion
The purpose of GeoDNS is to have intelligent DNS servers that understand where the traffic comes from and can redirect to the best IP address based on geolocation data. That makes the whole DNS system faster and offers better service for the visitors.