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Australia (Oceania): Have You Checked Your DNS Performance Lately?

Any organization with an online presence understands the importance of its website. That’s why companies invest thousands of dollars in design, user interface (UI) development, and site optimization.

But that’s only part of the puzzle.

Your website or online application can have all the bells and whistles, but if you aren’t fully optimizing your DNS, you’re losing money—plain and simple. Luckily, there are tools that can help your organization make the most of its domain strategy.

The first step is to get to know your current or potential DNS provider a little better. In this blog, we’ll show you how.

DNSPerf: The Industry’s Leading Source in Free DNS Provider Performance Data

As soon as you land on the homepage for DNSPerf, you’re greeted with a table of DNS providers ranked by raw performance for the world in the last 30 days. This is a great start.

But what if your business caters to people in a specific region?

Let’s say you operate an organization that exclusively (or mostly) services Australia or New Zealand. While helpful, the default “world” view isn’t giving you the most accurate picture. To compare DNS providers for the area that matters most to your business, you would want to select Oceania as the location.

Why is this important?

For starters, there are more than 43 million people in the Oceania region—that is about 0.54% of the world’s population. If your organization conducts most of its business here, you want to ensure your DNS provider has fast and reliable service that’s as close as possible to your consumers.

As you can see in the example above, provider ranks and speeds vary considerably when you switch from “World” to “Oceania.”

If you are comparing providers, you can see which has top speeds (in milliseconds) for that region. The higher on the list, the faster the DNS performance. Speeds color-coded in green are considered acceptable by industry standards. Those in orange are slightly below average, and providers in the red are severely under-performing.  

DNS Quality: Fastest Doesn’t Always Mean Best When it Comes to DNS

Speed is critical for query resolution, but the quality of your DNS service is just as important. While we have the option of comparing uptime between providers, we also measure the quality of service. Quality reflects the availability of a DNS provider’s individual nameservers. A single server failure puts more stress on other servers in a network, which in turn, can negatively affect your domain. Quality history is a good indicator of how reliable and strong a provider really is.

If you examine the data from a quality perspective, you’ll often see provider rankings shift. While Exoscale and Sectigo were number one in speeds in the last 30 days (as of this writing), Azure, Constellix, and DNS Made Easy were the top three-ranking providers in quality. Consistency is key, though, which is why you can view data from previous months, up to two years. For example, in October of 2020 and November 2019, Azure, Cloudflare, and Constellix were in the top three.

PerfOps: The #1 Premium DNS Data Source

If you thought the above information was cool, you haven’t seen anything yet! PerfOps’ premium data resources provide comprehensive insights into DNS performance that can be fine-tuned to your exact specifications.

Check out the difference.

The following graph shows a comparison of eight different providers. Not only do you see how they stack up against each other, but you also see how steady the performance of each provider was during the period selected (last 30 days).

You can also get historical views of provider performance in 30-day increments or get as laser-focused as a specific day and time.

For an even deeper dive, you can view data based on each providers’ individual nameservers rather than the combined data.

But guess what? It gets better.

Along with the graphs for speed and performance comparisons, you can also view the raw data logs of each provider to further pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses.

A Real-world Example of Using PerfOps Data

For example purposes, let’s say you’re an NS1 user and you’ve been getting customer complaints about load times in Sydney. Considering nearly 12% of the Oceania region and 19% of Australia’s population live in this city, you want to get to the bottom of any noticeable latency issues.  If your site is fully optimized for the web, you might think there’s nothing you can do. But with PerfOps, you’ll have access to data that can help identify potential culprits on the DNS side.

When you run a PerfOps performance check for Oceania, you’ll quickly notice that one of NS1’s servers is underperforming in comparison to some of their own nameservers (as well as other providers if you included them in the check). For instance, in Sydney, DNS4.P01.NSONE.NET resolves in 7 ms, but DNS1.P01.NSONE.NET takes 106 ms. Since NS1’s nameservers have been ranging from 2-48 ms in Sydney for the last 30 days, this could indicate a problem in their network. Now, you can provide NS1 with specific information, such as date, time, node IP, and round trip time (RTT) of request, which can be used to troubleshoot the issue on their end.

Top 10 DNS Providers for Australia and the Oceania Region

While there are many factors that affect DNS speed and performance, the data doesn’t lie. Here are the top 10 DNS providers for the Oceania region.

  1. Exoscale DNS
  2. Sectigo
  3. Constellix
  4. DNS Made Easy
  5. WordPress.com
  6. Rage4
  7. Gransy AnycastDNS
  8. Cloudflare
  9. Digital Ocean
  10. Softlayer

Choosing the Best DNS Provider For Your Organization Should Start with Data

With these free and premium tools, you can make DNS decisions that truly fit the unique needs of your organization—and pinpoint potential issues with your current provider’s network. With unbiased data on speeds, uptime, and performance quality at your fingertips, you can narrow down your prospects and confidently shop for DNS providers based on solutions and scalability.

Try PerfOps for Free by Visiting: https://panel.perfops.net/register