Your domain name is pretty valuable to you. Without it, your website would be unreachable and your emails would stop flowing. So how can you make sure your host is minimising the risk for you? There's a few quick checks you can do.
Go to http://www.mxtoolbox.com and enter your website address into the search tool prefixed with a: like this:
a:www.cultrix.co.uk
This will give you an IP address, in our case this is 109.75.167.169; this is known as the host (A) record and is the IP address of the server where our website lives. Next we want to check the nameservers so enter your domain name into the search tool without the www. and prefixed with ns: like this:
ns:cultrix.co.uk
There are a few things to check here. But first...
What is a nameserver?
A nameserver provides the answer to any queries about your domain name. So if I enter www.cultrix.co.uk into my web browser, my computer will ask a nameserver "where is this website?" and then take me there. If a nameserver isn't available to provide the answer, I cannot get to your website. Equally, if I send you an email my computer will ask the nameserver where it needs to go. If a nameserver can't provide the answer then most likely the email will be bounced back to me as undeliverable.
Are you vulnerable?
A single nameserver
Firstly you want to see more than one nameserver listed. If there is just the one then if that server is unavailable for any reason, a technical issue or maintenance perhaps, then your website and email will not work during this time.
Multiple nameservers, but still the same server
If you see several nameservers listed then make sure they don't have the same IP address. They may have different names but it's the IP address that counts. Also check that the nameserver IP addresses aren't very similar. The image to the right shows an example where the nameservers are very similar.
These could be two separate servers but are most likely the same. Given that the first three parts of the IP address are the same, if they are separate servers then they are in very close proximity to each other. If there's a problem at the datacentre where these servers are located then both will be unavailable at the same time.
The server where your website lives has the same IP address as one or more nameservers
This means that the same server that hosts your website (and possibly email) is also answering the queries. This is a bad idea because in the event of an issue with that server then you will lose access to everything. At least if there's a temporary problem with the web server, having separate nameservers means that some or all of your services can still function.
The best situation
A professional host will have multiple nameservers, in different datacentres, and another server that hosts your website and emails. If you follow the instructions above for the domain cultrix.co.uk you will find the following:
- Host record: 109.75.167.169
- Primary nameserver: 94.76.211.94
- Secondary nameserver: 5.77.45.249
What this tells you is that our website and both it's nameservers are completely different servers, and in fact our two nameservers are in completely different datacentres. Having this setup means that an outage with any one server, whether unplanned or scheduled, will not stop everything working.
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