Traffic director is a way to optimize and manage the traffic going to your domain by using geographical-based routing. Like this, your clients from Asia will get connected to your Asian servers; your European clients will connect to the closest servers they have in Europe, and so on.

Traffic Director is a cloud-based implementation of Load Balancing (you can check our article on Load balancing). It helps to improve the performance of your network. It is tremendously helpful for medium-sized and large businesses that need to distribute material around the globe.

Some companies call this service traffic director, others global traffic director or GeoDNS director, but it is best known as Traffic Director, which is why we use this term as the name of our service.

What Does Traffic Director Do?

Traffic Director helps you solve these challenges in a modern, service-based deployment. Traffic Director relies on Google Cloud-managed infrastructure instead of you having to handle your infrastructure. You focus on shipping application code that solves your business problems while letting Traffic Director manage the application networking complexities.

What is DNS?

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phonebook of the Internet. Humans access information online through domain names, such as nytimes.com or espn.com. Web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.

Each device connected to the Internet has a unique IP address that other machines use to find the device. DNS servers eliminate the need for humans to memorize IP addresses such as 192.168.1.1 (in IPv4), or more complex newer alphanumeric IP addresses such as 400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2 (in IPv6). 

What Does SimpleDNS Do?

The process of DNS resolution involves converting a hostname (such as www.example.com) into a computer-friendly IP address (such as 192.168.1.1). Each Internet-connected device has an IP address necessary to find the appropriate Internet device – like a street address is used to find a particular home. When a user wants to load a webpage, a translation must occur between what a user inputs into their web browser (example.com) and the machine-friendly address necessary to locate the example.com webpage.

As a statement of fact, it is crucial to learn about the different hardware components a DNS query must pass through to comprehend the method underlying DNS resolution. For the web browser, the DNS lookup occurs behind the scenes and requires no exchange from the users’ devices apart from the initial request.

The entire process of querying the various servers takes a fraction of a second and is usually unapparent to the user.

DNS servers answer questions from both inside and outside their domains. A server is programmed to respond with an authoritative response when a request for information about a name or address inside the domain comes from outside the domain.

When a server gets a request from within its domain for a name or address outside that domain, it forwards the request to another server, which is usually one managed by its ISP.

How Does Traffic Director Work For DNS?

Behind the scenes, Traffic Director is a complex system that intelligently balances DNS queries via strategically-placed global nameservers. Configuring it for your domain, however, is quite simple—you just have to play by the rules—regional rules you can set for yourself.  

In 5centsCDN, you can optimize your query traffic by six different regions:

1.  North America East 

2.  North America West 

3.  Europe

4.  Asia-Pacific 

5.  South America

6.  Oceania 

After being set up, Traffic Director responds to inquiries through the nameserver closest to the user’s location. For instance, it would be optimal if a nameserver in the North America East region responded to a request from a visitor from Florida who is accessing your website. In a worst-case scenario, a Florida user may receive an answer from a nameserver on the West Coast or another continent on an inefficient network.

Another use case for Traffic Director is if you wanted all Asia users to resolve to a server in China. To achieve this, you need to configure a DNS record for the Asia-Pacific region (see below for an example of how the Traffic Director looks in 5centsCDN).

Benefits Of Using Traffic Director For DNS Optimization

TD provides your domain with higher query resolution accuracy and a more streamlined DNS lookup process. Since traffic is routed based on regional resources, customer experience is improved, and you will see noticeable gains in performance. 

You can also combine TD with other 5centsCDN services, such as DNS Failover for added redundancy, IP Filters, Geo Proximity, and more. By combining these additional items with Traffic Director, you may better defend your domain against DDoS attacks, internal server or network failures, and overloaded endpoints.

Load Balancer Pricing – Global Traffic Director

Not only is TD effective—it is affordable too. The annual cost of a Traffic Director for Business-level members is just $660 more per domain (paid annually). Corporate memberships include TD for one domain and have the option to add extra domains for $540 per year or $180 per domain per year if purchasing TD for 50 or more domains. Corporate members also have the option of paying for additional TDs every month.

Optimize Your DNS Traffic For Ultimate Results

Consumer expectations are becoming more exact as the globe continues to push toward more computerized goods and services. Optimizing your DNS traffic is a crucial step to giving your consumers outstanding user experiences regardless of where they are. DNS Made Easy Traffic Director is a perfect solution for domains in the modern world.

Conclusion

You may enhance your DNS network by using GeoDNS or Traffic Director as someone refers to it. In addition to connecting to your website more quickly and receiving different materials based on where they are, your visitors will be pleased. For media organizations that need to deliver top-notch content to numerous users from all over the world as quickly as possible, GeoDNS is an excellent option.