DNS getting faster

Over the past few days I’ve been amazed by how ridiculously fast the Internet’s DNS infrastructure is, compared to yesteryear. It’s been a year or two since I’ve had to make lots of DNS changes, but with the seemingly constant DDoSing of EveryDNS (my DNS provider of choice till now), I’ve had to dive back into it. I’ve set up a new DNS system, got two secondary providers for my most important stuff, and had to move scores of domains about (and finally bother to learn BIND in the process).

Years ago, it took an eternity for anything to update. If you updated the parent nameservers for a domain, it’d take 24-48 hours to work its way through the system. Now I can do it, and within merely two minutes I’m seeing the new parent nameservers. Within 10 minutes usually my ISP’s DNS server has caught on too. New domain registrations have also got a lot faster. I’ve registered new .com domains and had them resolving on non-authoritative DNS servers within 10 minutes. That’s exactly how it should be, but it’s still amazing compared to the “wait at least 24 - 48 hours” mantra of the past.

Some people argue the Net hasn’t changed significantly in ten years, but even if the protocols are mostly the same.. ten years ago you could register a domain, build a Web service, have it all up and running, then get 10,000 visitors in your first day via Digg. You can create popular sites within 24 hours now, back then it took months. The world gets faster, etc.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.