NS1 offers the only Managed DNS network in mainland China with full support for state-of-the-art traffic management and native synchronization with the advanced features of NS1’s user portal—NS1 Connect.
Through Managed DNS for China, we offer faster DNS response times and improved application performance for users where the audience is primarily located in mainland China. The network also provides improved reliability by removing the need for DNS queries originating in China to traverse the “Great Firewall of China,” which can slow down or block DNS query traffic. Accounts with access to this network will continue to be able to use NS1’s exclusive Filter Chain technology, monitoring functionality, 3rd-party integrations, and REST API, now with China (.cn) specific domains.
Similar to our Dedicated DNS deployments, NS1’s DNS servers in mainland China form an independent DNS network and do not participate in NS1’s globally anycast Managed DNS network. Due to regulatory hurdles, the servers deployed in mainland China are unicasted. This is the case with all major international DNS providers in the region. To help alleviate performance impact, the majority of DNS resolvers in mainland China support SRTT. This results in sub 50ms response times to DNS queries originating in the region. To mitigate the effect of outages in mainland China, one of the IPs customers delegate their domains to will be part of our global anycast Managed DNS network.
Managed DNS for China is comprised of 4 POPs located in Shanghai, Beijing, Qingdao, and Shenzhen with connectivity to top-tier service providers in China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile.
Zone and record management is unified on NS1’s management control plane. Customers create, modify, and view their zones and records on their NS1 portal (or via the API) and all changes are immediately propagated to all the NS1 nameservers assigned to the customer. Customers using the China-based nameservers get the benefit of managing their records in one place and do not need to spend additional effort on synchronization across NS1’s delivery networks.
Global companies serving the China market are often forced to deploy a domain specifically for the market—typically a .cn domain for China and a .com or .net for the rest of the world. NS1’s exclusive Nameserver Acceleration for China product obviates the need for global enterprises to deploy a separate domain for their China-based users.
Nameserver Acceleration is a technology that allows end-users to leverage multiple independent DNS networks simultaneously, intelligently routing users to the most performant network based on their location and ISP. By leveraging NS1’s Managed DNS network in mainland China, DNS queries from users in the region will be served by NS1’s mainland China network while users outside of the ‘great firewall’ will reach our Managed global network, dynamically, all on the same ‘global’ domain (.com for example). This means the performance of any domain can be significantly accelerated for users in China without impacting performance negatively for users outside the region.
To configure a domain to utilize Nameserver Acceleration for China, the zone must be enabled on both NS1's Managed DNS network as well as the mainland China DNS network. This can be configured within the NS1 portal on the Zone Settings page within the relevant zone. The registrar for the domain will then need to be updated to reflect a new set of nameservers. Your customer success representative will supply these nameservers once your account has had Nameserver Acceleration enabled.