DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the major pillars of the Internet. It’s a critical service, and without it we would all have to use IP addresses instead of handy domain names like “Pingdom.com” when we want to visit websites, send emails, and so on.

However, DNS has a huge flaw. Because DNS lacks security features it has been relatively easy for hackers to trick DNS servers with false information. By tricking DNS servers, hackers have been able to hijack entire websites. Needless to say, attacks such as these are a security nightmare and can be used for a large variety of malicious purposes such as site defacement, phishing, malware installations, and more.

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Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.

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With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.

From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).

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Most reasonably technical Internet users have a pretty good idea what DNS is, but what actually happens when you look up a domain name is not always so clear. For those of you who are a bit uncertain of how it works (or just like geeky server charts), we found an excellent picture describing the chain of events of a DNS lookup.

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Verisign publishes a quarterly report about the domain name industry called The Domain Name Industry Brief. The latest report, summing up Q1 2009, was just released.

Since there is always a lot of data in these reports to mull through, we decided to pick out what we think are some of the more interesting facts and figures and sum them up in this article.

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We’ve been offering the possibility to monitor DNS servers for a while. So we were glad to see an article about DNS services and Pingdom’s DNS check functionality done by John Philip Green, CTO of Savvica.

Using Pingdom he evaluated the performance of DNS hosting providers to use as a guideline for selecting a new provider.

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A DDoS attack on the DNS servers of the domain registrar Network Solutions slowed down access to hundreds of thousands of websites during several hours last Friday (January 23).

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When troubleshooting network or DNS problems related to your website, server or other online services, it can be very useful to have access to online tools that can help you narrow down the problems. This article contains 14 useful online tools that can help you with this. And they are all free. We will go [...]

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The basic premise is this: You have a website you want to monitor. It’s important to you that it works, and you need to know right away when there is a problem with it. This article will show you how you can set up highly detailed monitoring of your website using the Pingdom uptime monitoring [...]

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We have just added a new check type for monitoring DNS servers and DNS lookups. Why should I monitor my DNS servers? If DNS lookups are not working, no one will be able to access your website since there will be no way to translate your domain name to an IP address. (Computers on the [...]

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