GSLB.me is a hosted, cloud-based, highly reliable DNS as a service and Global Server Load Balancing solution that provides full authoritative DNS services, DNS-based geographical traffic balancing, failover, high availability, geographical routing, dynamic DNS, DNSSEC and recursive DNS with antimalware protection.

Servers and applications are monitored 24×7 with application and network-level health checks to ensure they are correctly responding and delivering the expected level of service.

 

GSLB.me - DNS as a Service Architectural view

 

GSLB.me is a powerful cloud hosted DNS solution and provides a full range of dynamic and smart DNS services:

  • provides robust, scalable and distributed full authoritative DNS services with DNSSEC
  • supports dynamic DNS updates to run your websites and applications over dynamic IP addresses
  • detects service disruptions and dynamically re-routes clients and customers to the best available datacenter and server
  • knows your business logic and behaves accordingly
  • notifies you if your applications are underperforming or experiencing issues
  • provides enhanced visibility and analytics
  • is cloud-based: nothing to install, no changes to your infrastructure or applications required
  • integrates with your favourite CDN provider and can dinamically balance your traffic
  • is free: you can register for free and start using it immediately
  • is “pay as you grow: you can buy additional flexibility and services
  • is fully supported: our support team is ready to handle your requests and help you

 

Realtime geographical healthmap


How it works

The DNS protocol is used to associate IP addresses to hostnames in order to make Internet resources reachable. Static DNS returns one or more IP addresses associated to one hostname (ie. www.gslb.me). Static DNS has no way to understand if your website, application or datacenter is alive and reachable or not, and has no way to understand if your websites, applications and datacenters are performing properly according to your service levels.

As a result, traditional DNS systems cannot provide a consistent, always available user experience.

GSLB.me is a cloud-based fully dynamic DNS solution that monitors your datacenters and servers in order to provide consistent access to your websites and applications to your customers and users. GSLB.me replies to DNS queries by returning the best available IP address(es) based on how your website/application is performing and based on dynamic criteria such as your customer/client geographical position.

GSLB.me can be easily integrated with your existing DNS infrastructure and requires no change to your existing infrastructure and applications.

Let’s take as an example:

Realtime services status dashboard
  • your website or application is published on the Internet as http://www.mysite.tld
  • you have two authoritative DNS servers for your mysite.tld domain (they can be managed by yourself or by your ISP)
  • you have at least two servers with different IP addresses publishing http://www.mysite.tld

With this standard configuration you can deliver your website or application from both servers.

But… what if either server/datacenter goes down or starts performing unreliably? The answer is that a significant part of your traffic is lost and your customers and clients cannot access your website/application properly.

To avoid this GSLB.me can take care of resolving your www.mysite.tld hostname. DNS resolution is handled by monitoring your datacenters in real-time and by reacting in case of failure and performance issues.

Your new setup would then be:

  • your website or application is published on the Internet as http://www.mysite.tld
  • you have at least two authoritative DNS servers for your mysite.tld domain (GSLB.me can be your authoritative DNS too)
  • you have at least two servers with different IP addresses publishing http://www.mysite.tld
  • your www.mysite.tld is defined as a CNAME pointing to a GSLB.me-handled FQDN of your choice (for instance mysite.glsb.me)
  • GSLB.me is configured to perform several checks on your servers to dinamically and correctly provide DNS resolution for mysite.gslb.me.

This enables your website or application to run both in disaster recovery (active/standby) and business continuity (active/active) modes.

 

Service Monitoring

Realtime statistics for DNS requests
Realtime statistics for DNS requests

The ability to perform advanced servers and applications health monitoring is the key to delivering resilient and always available applications. GSLB.me provides a comprehensive set of healthchecks to monitor performance and usage levels for your applications and servers.

In addition to flexible network-level checks, GSLB.me drills down into layer 7 to inspect application health, in order to detect issues and automatically adjust DNS resolution to route around servers that are experiencing outages.
Powerful layer 7 application monitors, ranging from HTTP, HTTPS, OpenVPN, SMTP, POP3 and others provide complete control over your applications environment. GSLB.me product roadmap is user-driven: feature requests are welcome to support additional healthchecks.

 

Reporting & Data Intelligence

Visibility and analytics are key to get a comprehensive view on how your DNS services are running and performing.

Realtime requests map
Realtime requests map

 

GSLB.me provides powerful tools to keep everything under full control:

  • query statistics per country, ISP and ASN
  • realtime usage graphs
  • live view of all incoming DNS queries

Statistics can be accessed through the management web interface and through the REST API, supporting custom integrations and interoperability with third-party monitoring systems and software solutions.

 

Recursive DNS

GSLB.me is also a powerful recursive DNS, cloud-based, with security on top. In addition to full visibility and reporting on DNS queries, it enhances security by blocking malicious activities by malware and spyware.

 

REST API

GSLB.me provides a fully-fledged REST API to manage your DNS services. Using the API you can handle authoritative DNS services, DNS-balanced services and fetch realtime statistics for third-party integration.

The REST API is open to all users, we provide free assistance understanding, using, integrating our REST services.