Dyn’s China Network is a unique extension of Dyn Managed DNS, allowing our customers to increase the performance of zones that target users within mainland China.

To set up a Zone on Dyn’s China Network please contact our Concierge team by emailing: concierge@dyn.com.

What is special about Dyn’s China Network?
Due to the unique regulatory requirements of mainland China, it is difficult to resolve DNS queries using a DNS server positioned outside mainland China. This has caused significant performance and reliability issues for companies expanding into the Chinese market. By building a separate network within mainland China, Dyn can provide faster and more reliable DNS resolution for these companies.

Is this new China Network part of Dyn’s anycast network?

No. Dyn’s China Network operates as a separate unicast network (currently with POPs in Beijing and Shanghai). This network should not to be confused with our Hong Kong POP that is part of Dyn’s anycast network.

Why is the first iteration of Dyn’s China network unicast and not anycast?

There are unique challenges with anycast within China due to local regulations and ISP policies with the major China telecom providers. Dyn is currently exploring options to provide anycast service within mainland China in the future.

What nameservers does a China-specific domain delegate to?

To ensure maximum reliability within China, Dyn requires that multinational Dyn customers delegate China-specific domains (ex. company.cn) to a mixture of China Network nameservers and at least one of the Dyn anycast network nameservers.

What is the impact of mixing the China unicast and world-wide anycast nameservers in the same delegation?

Most recursive DNS servers will favor the lowest latency nameservers, which will direct most traffic originating from China to one of Dyn’s POPs within China, while most traffic outside of China would be directed to Dyn’s anycast network. In the event of connectivity issues to our China network, the anycast nameservers in the delegation will be available to answer queries. This helps ensure the reliability and performance of your China specific zones.

What Dyn Managed DNS features are available on the China Network?

Dyn’s China Network supports both primary and secondary zones. Traffic Director’s features (Active Failover, Ratio Load Balancing, and Geolocation Load Balancing) are not available at this time. Additionally, QPS reports will not take into account data from our China Network.

Should I delegate my China specific zone (company.cn) or my main zone (company.com)?

Currently, the China Network is only available for China-specific domains (company.cn). This allows your Chinese customers to take full advantage of this network, while the rest of the world continues to use Dyn’s flagship 18-POP anycast network. This configuration eliminates the risk of visitors to your main zone (company.com) being routed into China, which would increase latency significantly and increase the likelihood of reliability issues.

How are zone changes propagated to the China Network?

Customers will update zones as normal, either via the Dyn web portal/API for primary zones or using zone transfers (AXFR/IXFR) in the case of secondary zones. On zones that use the China Network, these changes are propagated from our core sites through multiple zone propagation relays geographically located near China. Each of these relays then attempts to propagate the changes to the China Network. By using multiple relays, we significantly improve the chances of successful and performant zone propagation. Most zone changes will propagate within minutes of publishing the change.

 

Last Updated: June 24, 2014