Yes, we had a short outage this morning. We're still investigating the root cause but the symptoms were essentially a simultaneous slow down across all name servers. It's quite possible this is part of the same DDoS that Zerigo is facing, we're not certain - we've been seeing lots of spikes today from various IP addresses (but we've actually been seeing similar patterns for quite some time, as have other DNS providers).
We'll post a more extensive post-mortem once we have a better understanding of what happened, but our main goal at the moment has been to ensure systems remain stable and responsive.
Instead of adding another unicast network to the mix, why wouldn't you start using an IP anycast network? DNSMadeEasy / Route53 / EasyDNS / etc..
It seems crazy to move from one service that purchases 6 name servers to another one that is only on 6 servers.... DNS Made Easy fought an attack that was over 200 Gbps a few months ago.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150668694804467&...
Can any unicast provider even really get close to fighting an attack like this?
Let's be serious at some point.... 6 servers... the MOST you can push is 6 Gbps. And most likely they are bound to about 400 Mbps of DNS traffic (based on CPU load). Unless you have hundreds of name servers and multiple locations... are you even really competing in uptime anymore?
http://stats.pingdom.com/qqps0x9eb0at/195711 indicates the outage on NS1 was 26 minutes. It's still a long time and we're pulling the trigger on some changes (read: capital investments) to stop it from happening in the future.
We'll post a more extensive post-mortem once we have a better understanding of what happened, but our main goal at the moment has been to ensure systems remain stable and responsive.