Why We Switched to Advanced Hosting’s Anycast DNS: A Stability-Centric Perspective 1
Last updated
Last updated
Rethinking DNS as a Critical Performance Layer
DNS is often viewed as just the entry point of web architecture—static, passive, and rarely optimized. However, when you're building distributed systems that serve users globally and require high uptime, DNS becomes a pivotal performance layer. That realization led our team to reassess our provider, and we ultimately migrated our domains to Advanced Hosting’s Anycast DNS.
Our motivation was clear: we needed lower resolution times, regional fault tolerance, and an infrastructure that could keep pace with our growing demands for automation and resilience. The technical overview and feature set offered by Advanced Hosting, available here: matched those priorities on paper. The real test, however, came with actual production usage.
Deployment Simplicity with Professional Backbone
What immediately set Advanced Hosting apart was the ease of initial DNS zone deployment. The dashboard is engineered for users who know their way around TTLs, record types, and propagation cycles. We configured dozens of DNS records—A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, and SPF entries—within minutes. The system also supports templating, which saved time when replicating standard records across our development and production zones.
Beyond the UI, API access made it possible to manage records programmatically. This allowed us to include DNS configuration as part of our Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code workflow. Being able to treat DNS zones as versioned and reproducible assets brought much-needed consistency to our operations.
Global Routing, Real Impact
The main value of Anycast DNS lies in its routing logic. Once a query is initiated, it gets automatically directed to the nearest available node in the network. That sounds good in theory, but in our case, we saw a concrete improvement in first-byte delivery across every continent.
Our benchmark tests measured DNS resolution times from over 40 global locations. The average resolution latency dropped by over 30% compared to our previous provider. From Singapore to São Paulo, our application loaded measurably faster—not due to code optimization or CDN tweaking, but purely because DNS queries were resolving closer to the user.
Availability and Fault Tolerance in Practice
During a recent simulated failure drill, we disabled our origin servers in two major regions. Thanks to the distributed nature of Advanced Hosting’s Anycast DNS, traffic was automatically rerouted without any manual updates or propagation delays. Users continued accessing the application without noticing anything unusual.
This level of fault tolerance cannot be achieved with unicast DNS architectures, where outages in a single node can interrupt service continuity. With Advanced Hosting, we gained the confidence to deploy updates and test edge cases without fear of DNS becoming a single point of failure.
Visibility, Monitoring, and Control
Another underrated advantage was the insight we gained through the built-in analytics tools. We could monitor query volume per region, identify spikes in DNS traffic, and detect suspicious patterns early. TTL usage trends helped optimize our cache behavior on both the DNS and client side.
Alerts were easy to configure—if a record wasn't resolving correctly or TTLs were expiring faster than expected, we got notified. This monitoring layer added an operational safety net, helping us catch misconfigurations before they reached end users.
Conclusion
DNS isn’t usually the most exciting part of an infrastructure stack—but when it fails, the consequences are immediate and costly. Our transition to Advanced Hosting’s Anycast DNS wasn’t driven by hype or price, but by a need for robust, fast, and globally consistent domain resolution.
In daily operations, this service has reduced latency, simplified automation, and strengthened our ability to recover quickly from outages. For projects that span countries, rely on real-time interactions, or operate under high uptime requirements, this DNS solution provides infrastructure-grade reliability with developer-grade flexibility.