Home/Notes/A practical look at DNS TTL for a plumber
A practical look at DNS TTL for a plumber
15 Dec 2024
How a plumber deals with DNS TTL — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: TTL of 300 seconds. This is where DNS TTL breaks for a plumber.
Most of the damage we see in DNS TTL comes from doing too much. A single correct record beats three that were supposed to be clever.
DNS TTL for a plumber is nothing like DNS TTL for a multinational. The scale is tiny but the stakes are the same: one wrong record and nobody can reach you.
The real issue was not DNS TTL itself — it was TTL of 300 seconds. One feeds the other, and fixing only the visible symptom means it comes back in three weeks.
We check DNS TTL for a plumber once a quarter. It takes five minutes and has caught two problems in the past year. Both would have caused downtime within a week.
Complexity is the enemy of uptime. a plumber had three layers of proxy in front of a site that gets two hundred visits a day. We replaced it with a static page and correct DNS TTL.
We run a monthly diff on DNS for a plumber. If a record changes and nobody in the team made the change, we get an alert. TTL of 300 seconds was caught this way last quarter.
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