When a country shuts down the internet, is your company at risk?
With the proliferation of short urls for use in twitter, facebook, foursquare and others, many companies are purchasing domains not in the usual .com and .net but instead using formerly country specific domains like .co, .ly, .in and lots of others. Over the past few weeks, we have all seen the unrest in Egypt, Libya and other countries which has caused some of them to shut down internet access. So where does this leave the companies who own domains controlled by these countries?
Without getting into the technical details of the internet – the short answer is: it depends. Every top level domain (TLD) name (.com, .net, .ly, .it, etc) are controlled by a specific country (.com is controlled by the US). If the main registry for the TLD goes down and the backup copies go down, then all of the domains for that TLD will be inaccessible. Some countries have started using out of country backup providers but many of the smaller ones simply haven’t gotten there yet. Last week, Libya shut down their Internet for about 16 hours, fortunately for companies like bit.ly, their domains were still cached outside of Libya and were usable until the connection was restored on Friday only to be shutdown again on Saturday.
A number of companies (posterious is one) are starting to shift over to new shortcut urls, but what a shift and disruption in their business this is causing, not to mention the engineering expense to plus the loss of brand collateral.
So what would your business do in this situation? What’s your backup plan if you own one of these domains? Currently we own ajci.co but we’re not using it for anything critical (we use it as a short url for posts instead of bit.ly links). Other domains we own with country specific TLDs we are using but only as a secondary option. If something were to happen with the internet here in the US, we do have a backup plan in place to use an alternate domain name and an alternate hosting provider. Just like every area of your business your internet presence deserves a disaster plan.
What is your business doing to ensure a single event can’t shut down your business or an outside entity can’t jepoardize how you communicate with customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
