What is Premium DNS?

Premium DNS, also called Anycast DNS, is an advanced DNS service that boosts your website’s performance and protects it from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. It works by using a large network of DNS servers around the globe. When someone visits your website, Premium DNS automatically connects to the server location closest to them, giving your website a boost in speed and improving the user experience of visitors worldwide.

How does the DNS work?

To understand why top-level domains are important, you need to know how the domain name system (DNS) works. Computers can only recognize numbers, not names. The true “names” of websites are their IP addresses, not their domain names. The DNS was invented to make browsing the Internet much easier. After all, you likely can’t remember “185.87.187.6”, but you can remember openprovider.com!

All IP addresses on the internet are connected to a unique domain, just like addresses in the real world are connected to particular houses or buildings. After you type in a domain name in your browser and hit Enter, your computer will connect to the DNS to retrieve the IP address of the website you want to visit. Your browser will then lead you to this website.

DNS nameservers are an important part of the DNS. The nameserver is the web server that pinpoints your domain name’s location to your computer. The quality of your nameserver will affect your website’s security and performance - so it is important to choose a good DNS hosting service for your website.

Nameservers store DNS records, which are pieces of information that help in the proper functioning of the DNS. For example, the A (address) record tells the DNS which IP address corresponds to a specific domain, while the MX (mail) record specifies the mail servers responsible for receiving emails on behalf of the domain.

In general, when you register a domain name at a particular provider, you get a free DNS nameserver with it. Free DNS services offer all of the basic features you need for your website, including the possibility to add and manage multiple DNS records. With many DNS providers, you can also choose to upgrade to Premium DNS hosting, which comes with several beneficial features. 

How does Premium DNS work?

With regular DNS providers, the DNS service is stored on just one server. This means that it will take longer for the server to respond when it receives queries from the other side of the world - and if this server crashes, your website will be down immediately. Premium DNS providers use a worldwide server network, in which your website visitors are instantly connected to the name server location closest to them. This ensures a fast and smooth experience for visitors all over the world.

If there is a disruption in one of the DNS servers or regions, this does not affect your customers. In these cases, Premium DNS automatically transfers requests over to the next closest DNS server in a visitor’s region. This worldwide coverage means that your websites have a guarantee to be up at least 99.99% of the time.

Do I need Premium DNS?

Premium DNS is a great choice if you want to optimize your website’s user experience for your visitors and prospective customers. Fast website loading times are an important pull factor for users to visit your website and find out more about what you have to offer. This study by Portent found that a load time between 0-4 seconds is best for optimum conversion rates. If your website is slower, that means that customers are likely to close the tab with your website in their browser and look elsewhere instead. Premium DNS can help you achieve blazing-fast loading times, reducing the risk of losing prospective customers to a slow website. 

Besides improving website speed, Premium DNS also helps protect your site against DDoS attacks. According to Corero’s whitepaper, The Need for Always-On in DDoS Protection, the average cost of a DDoS attack in the US is around $218k - and this number does not even take ransomware costs into account (a phenomenon in which organizations are forced to pay a “ransom cost” to cyber criminals to stop them from attacking their website). 

Besides the financial costs, downtime caused by DDoS attacks can also lead to loss of reputation for your company, as customers start associating your website with downtime and low security. With its inbuilt DDoS protection, a Premium DNS hosting service is a good choice to secure your DNS servers against attacks, keeping your website up at all times.

What is the difference between free DNS and Premium DNS?

Premium DNS adds three special features on top of the regular DNS service. These include worldwide coverage with 99.99% uptime, a blazing-fast response time, and built-in protection against DDoS attacks.

You can see the full overview of the differences between the regular DNS and Premium DNS hosting service at Openprovider in the table below:

Keep in mind that different DNS providers may offer slightly different products and benefits!

Benefits of Premium DNS

There are many benefits to choosing a Premium DNS hosting service. These are the most important ones.

• Blazing fast resolution: Premium DNS ensures that your customers are always connected to the closest server. This results in lower latency and faster access times to your web properties.

• Global presence: All your DNS zones are pushed to DNS servers around the globe, ensuring an optimal user experience for your global customers.

• DDoS protection: Premium DNS keeps your DNS zone protected from DDoS DNS attacks at all times.

• 99.99% uptime guarantee: Built-in smart routing and anycast capabilities ensure that your DNS zones are always online. Your websites will always be accessible, regardless of regional disruptions.

• Competitive pricing: Premium DNS is a popular service, and you will find many domain registrars, hosting companies, and security experts offering this service at various rates. Openprovider’s Premium DNS service stands out because of our competitive pricing, specifically for those who are looking to buy Premium DNS subscriptions in bulk and/or resell them to their own end customers.

• Easily managed: Manage Premium DNS zones with the same friendly and intuitive interface that you use for your regular DNS zones in the Openprovider control panel and API.

How to set up Premium DNS

In most cases, setting up Premium DNS is easy and requires only basic technical knowledge about DNS infrastructure. The specifics differ slightly for different DNS providers. 

At Openprovider, you can select Premium DNS as an add-on when you register new domains or turn it on for an existing domain. When creating a DNS zone via the control panel or API, you should specify the provider of the DNS zone as Openprovider (standard, and free of charge) or Sectigo (our partner for Premium DNS). If you select Sectigo, this means that Premium DNS is enabled for this domain and that you will be billed for it yearly. To turn on Premium DNS, you just need to have enough balance on your account to pay the first year of the subscription.

After you create your Premium DNS zones, you can manage them easily using the standard DNS user interface from the control panel and/or through Openprovider’s DNS API. Premium DNS zones are also fully compatible with Openprovider’s standalone DNS Panel (dnspanel.io).

Premium DNS works on a yearly billing basis, and the minimum subscription time is one year. Your subscription is renewed automatically every year unless the Premium zone is deleted. Please note that once a Premium zone has been created for a specific domain name, it cannot be reused with or transferred to another domain name. 

Premium DNS is simple and intuitive to set up, and if you have basic knowledge about DNS, you should not run into any problems here. You can find the most frequent questions and answers about our Premium DNS service in the dedicated section of our Knowledge Base.

Are you ready to boost your website speed and protect your online presence against DDoS attacks? Sign up and get started with Premium DNS today!