Secondary DNS
Both DigiCert DNS and NS1 support Secondary DNS.
For ultimate redundancy, our services pair well together. Your business will also benefit from DigiCert DNS' industry-leading speeds regardless of whether we are your primary or secondary provider, as resolvers tend to prefer the faster authoritative nameservers.
Failover Services
DNS Made Easy operates on its own extensive, bare metal server infrastructure and utilizes its proprietary Peregrine Instant DNS updates (PIDU) technology, which pushes DNS changes to our thousands of authoritative nameservers in less than a second, making our Failover service one of the fastest in the world.
NS1: Failover
NS1 offers manual and automatic failover options. With manual failover, customers can configure their DNS records with a single IP, which can be changed in the event of a failure. This works best when using what NS1 calls Filter Chains, which require additional configurations. Their automated solution uses Data Feeds which utilize health-check monitoring tools. With this in place, traffic is automatically rerouted to a secondary resource if your primary resource is down so that domains avoid unnecessary downtime.
DigiCert DNS: Failover
DigiCert DNS' Failover solution operates similarly to NS1’s. However, our Failover service constantly monitors the health of your endpoints to ensure you have no unnecessary downtime automatically. We also verify the integrity of your backup endpoints prior to redirecting traffic because if an alternative resource is down too, sending traffic there would cause additional service disruptions. You have the option to configure up to five endpoints in a failover configuration, as well as the ability to turn off auto-failover after first failover.
Global Traffic Steering vs Intelligent Traffic Steering
NS1: Intelligent Traffic Steering
This option is Ns1’s geographical distribution solution, which steers traffic across distributed environments. Intelligent Traffic Steering uses NS1 Filter Chains to make traffic decisions based on real-time data, and directs traffic to the most optimal resource. It also lets you build routing policies based on commits and capacity.
DigiCert DNS: Global Traffic Directory (GTD)
DigiCert DNS' Global Traffic Director lets users create region-specific DNS records that can serve content based on user location. Records can be configured for six regions around the world. GTD greatly improves performance, resolution accuracy, and speeds.
DNS Analytics
NS1: Third Party Integration
Ns1 does not offer its own analytics solution, but does support integration with Grafana. This integration allows you to add DNS analytics to your IT management dashboard, which provides insight into your domain traffic.
DigiCert DNS: DNS Analytics
We offer true DNS analytics that provides in-depth, real-time reporting on your domain(s) query activity. This solution is invaluable for troubleshooting DNS errors and misconfigurations, researching threats based on historical domain data, and for optimizing performance.
DNS Speed Comparison
DigiCert DNS speed beats NS1 on a global scale.
The lower number is better performing and represents faster speeds. The graph shown is based on a world view (4/2023)
1. DigiCert DNS Trust Manager - 16.29 ms
2. NS1 - 25.14 ms
NS1 Connect Issues 2022
According to the NS1 Status Page 8/4/2022:
NS1's Managed DNS Network for NS1 Connect is experiencing delays propagating newly created zones to our edge nameservers. Engineers are actively working on this and additional information will be posted as it becomes available.
Duration: 1 hour 4 minutes
Affected Components: DNS Delivery Networks > NS1 Connect Network
DDoS Attack Prevention
NS1: None
NS1 doesn’t have a built-in DDoS prevention solution, and instead, focuses on redundant measures to ensure your domain is protected.
DigiCert DNS: Real-time Traffic Anomaly Detection (RTTAD)
We share NS1’s sentiment on redundancy—it’s a vital defense against DDoS attacks and other types of outages. However, we offer a real-time monitoring service that uses machine learning (based on the Fourier Arima model) to analyze and predict web traffic. With RTTAD, you can view your DNS traffic in real time, and are instantly notified if any suspicious activity is detected. With RTTAD enabled, you can make proactive decisions rather than reactive ones and stop an attack before it can bring your domain offline.
Do you need more advanced GeoDNS services?
Our sister company Constellix has one of the most innovative DNS and Multi-CDN feature sets in the industry. See how Constellix and NS1 compare.