Anycast Nameservice
Useful information about Anycast
Anycast – always the most efficient route
to your destination
Ensuring that websites, emails and online shopping always work quickly, securely and reliably.
The advantages of Anycast
- Maximum reliability: If one server fails, another takes over – without any noticeable impact on the user.
- High scalability: The infrastructure can be flexibly expanded and is prepared for growing demand.
- Shortest loading times: Thanks to global distribution and connection to large Internet nodes.
- Strong protection for everyone: The global network provides effective protection against overloads, for example from so-called DDoS attacks.
Anycast – for a stable and secure .de network
This technology is a crucial part of the Domain Name System (DNS), which can be imagined as a navigation system for the Internet. Every day, the DNS ensures that when you enter a name such as denic.de, you arrive at the right destination. At DENIC, we rely on Anycast to guarantee precisely this stability and accessibility for all .de domains and to protect them from attacks.
Unicast and Anycast in comparison
The strength of Anycast technology is most evident when compared directly with the conventional Unicast method.
In the unicast principle, a sender addresses a request to a single, fixed server address. Communication takes place exclusively between these two defined endpoints.
- Advantage: The system has a simple design. (Uncomplicated technical implementation)
- Disadvantage: Long response times (latency) over large geographical distances and complete service failure in the event of a malfunction of the target server.
Anycast is a routing method in which an entire group of globally distributed servers can be reached under the same IP address. Requests are dynamically routed to the server that can be reached via the most efficient route and can therefore send the fastest response.
- Advantages: Requests automatically take the shortest route to the nearest server. This ensures significantly faster response times and a very high level of reliability, as another server in the group immediately takes over if a problem occurs.
- Disadvantage: There are no disadvantages for the user. The additional technical effort in the background is the basis for increased speed and stability.
The protective shield for .de:
How Anycast defends against DDoS attacks
A DDoS attack is like an artificially created traffic jam on the data highway. Attackers flood a server with so many requests that it crashes and becomes inaccessible to normal users.
Anycast is therefore a powerful shield that ensures the stability of the internet and the accessibility of your services.
This is where Anycast shows its full potential:
- The attack is distributed: Instead of a single server receiving the full impact of the attack, the load is distributed across all 24 servers worldwide.
- The attack fizzles out: Each individual server only has to handle a small part of the attack and can easily filter out the malicious requests.
- The service remains online: While the attack "fizzles out" in the global network, the servers remain accessible for your normal requests.
