Skip to main content Skip to search
Jonathan Lewis
Posted by
Jonathan Lewis on
October 5, 2017

Introducing Nameserver Acceleration for China

One of the things that gets me jazzed about working at NS1 is the level of innovation and creativity of our team. A few weeks ago we announced Managed DNS for China which set a new standard for DNS traffic management for the world’s largest internet market. Now our engineers have made it even better. We just released a new technology called Nameserver Acceleration™. This technology makes it simpler for global enterprises to gain the advantages of high performance DNS and traffic management. Here is what it is all about:

Internet traffic entering or exiting China has to pass through a choke point often called the Great Firewall. Because of the performance issues this creates, internet services for users in China are best hosted inside China and vice versa. We offer Managed DNS for China to answer DNS queries originating in China. But how do we ensure those queries go to our China DNS network and not to our servers outside of China? That is done by you the customer, through zone delegation. The zones you want served by the China DNS network need to be delegated only to that network. If you are a global company, you create China specific zones (such as example.cn) for that region and another set of zones for the rest of the world (example.com). The applications and content might be the same, but their internet names need to be different if you want to ensure they are served by different DNS networks.

That works, but it is not ideal. Maybe you don’t want to set up and maintain separate internet name spaces just for the purposes of traffic management. Managing just one set of zones under your .COM brand would certainly be easier than doing everything in duplicate. Or, if you are a .CN and your audience is primarily in China but you also have users outside of China, delegating your .CN zones just to the China DNS network results in poorer performance for users outside of China. But if you delegate your .CN to both DNS networks, users on both sides of the great firewall will get poor performance from time to time. The bottom line is this: Wouldn’t it be better if the global DNS system itself was able to choose in real time which DNS network to use instead of doing it via naming and delegation?

That in a nutshell is what Nameserver Acceleration for China does. If you are a .COM or a .NET serving a global audience, you can delegate your zones to our entire DNS infrastructure (NS1’s Managed DNS and Managed DNS for China). Our traffic management technology determines the source of DNS requests and routes them to the DNS network best able to respond. If the request comes from China it is answered by one of our DNS servers in China. Otherwise the request is answered by the closest server on our global anycasted network.

Come talk to us about your global content delivery challenges. We love having those conversations and are happy to share knowledge and experiences.