Why Every Blogger Should Know The DNS Fix for Outages

Last week I woke up to missing Sumome share buttons on my sites. You know the feeling …. You go to bed and all is working well and you wake up to what little gremlin happened into town overnight and ate my Sumome share buttons? Who said DNS Fix?

A quick tour of Twitter revealed Sumome had technical issues and was still experiencing tech issues with their server and host. Note to Sumome, don’t make me look on Twitter to find information get out in front with communicating the issues.

What caught my attention on Twitter after the usual barrage of clear the cache answers which did not solve the issue was a helpful person mentioning DNS. My ears perked up.

The DNS Fix was something I was all too familiar with due to my dealing with my cable company and their continuing.

In Layman’s Terms Why You Should Bookmark the DNS Fix

What is DNS? DNS is the Domain Name System which is translated into internet protocol addresses.

DNS is required for your internet provider to access the internet. This is out of your control. A DNS setting exists on all of your devices which allows you to access the internet via your providers’ DNS.

Google provides the same DNS service for free but of course with different settings. Therefore if your internet provider is under a DDOS attack or its’ DNS is compromised you will be unable to access the internet. My internet provider has been a frequent target of DDOS malicious attacks which are a distributed denial of service attacks rendering customer access to the internet denied or slowed.

Sumome eventually fixed their issues but their fix required that each internet providers’ DNS be updated and in some cases internet providers were stating they only update their DNS every 24 hours. So it would take some time for the Sumome fix to reach all of its’ customers.

I personally decided to change the DNS settings to the Google DNS and wait out a resolution from Sumome versus adding new share buttons onto the sites. I knew it would be quicker to change the DNS than fool around with adding Share buttons back on the site with a new provider. And for all the Sumome customers with double sets of Share buttons it was not an issue.

How To Change Your DNS Server

I have written an article with steps to change your DNS server to Google’s DNS server > click here to access.

Google provides clear instructions and I promise you if you can add a plug in then you certainly can change the DNS. One note on changing the DNS is that is does have to be done per device. It can also be accomplished on the router; however a different set of instructions would apply.

For example if you change the DNS to the Google DNS on your desktop for a wireless connection and also use a tablet on the same wireless connection, the DNS must be changed on the tablet.

This is a good fix to have in your website and internet toolbox for the unexpected happening.

I hope you will never need the fix; however I have found this fix more than helpful in quite a few different circumstances in the past year.