When you think about critical infrastructure, DNS or domain naming services might not pop into your head, but what is more important than making sure your website opens quickly and efficiently for your users. NS1 is a New York City startup trying to bring software smarts and automation to the DNS space.
“We’re a DNS and [Internet] traffic management technology company. We sit in a critical path. Companies point domains at our platforms,” company CEO and co-founder Kris Beevers told TechCrunch. That means when you type in the domain name like Google.com, you go to Google and you go there fast. It’s basic internet plumbing, but it’s essential.
Beevers cut his teeth as head of engineering at Voxel, a cloud infrastructure company that was acquired by Internap in 2012 for $35 million. He and his NS1 co-founders saw an opening in the DNS space and launched the company in 2013 with a set of software-defined DNS services. The startup was able to take advantage of the New York startup ecosystem early on to drive some business, even before they went looking for funding, but one incident really helped put the company on the map and effectively double its business.
That event occurred in almost exactly two years ago in 2016. One of NS1’s primary competitors, Dyn, a New Hampshire-based DNS company was the victim of a massive DDoS attack that took down the service for hours. When critical infrastructure like your domain name server goes away, you see the consequences pretty starkly and suddenly customers realized they didn’t just need this service, they needed redundancy in case the primary service went down — and with that attack, NS1’s business effectively doubled overnight.
Suddenly everyone who owned one, needed another for redundancy. One competitor’s misfortune turned out to be highly beneficial for NS1, who turned out to be in the right place at the right time with the right solution. Dyn was actually acquired by Oracle later that year.
“DNS had been around since 1983. The first 20 years were very boring with no commercial ecosystem,” Beevers said. Even when it went commercial in the early 2000s, nobody was looking at this as a software problem. “We saw everyone in this space was a hardware or networking vendor. Nobody was a software company. Nobody had thought about automation or how automation fit into the stack. And nobody saw the big infrastructure trends,” Beevers explained.
They got their start in the adtech startup space that was booming in NYC when they launched in 2013. These companies were willing to take a chance with an unknown startup, partly because they were looking for any edge they could get, and partly because they knew Beevers from his days at Voxall so he wasn’t a completely unknown quantity.
“Our ability around dynamic traffic management and performance reliability gave those ad companies [an advantage].They were able to take a chance on us. If we have a bad day, a customer can’t operate. We had limited infrastructure. They placed a bet on us because of the [positive] impact we had on their business.”
Today the company is growing fast, has raised close to $50 million and has close to 100 employees. While the bulk of those folks are in NYC, they have also opened offices in San Francisco, Londonderry, NH, the UK and Singapore.
Beevers says the Dyn incident in many ways brought the industry closer together. While they compete, they still need to cooperate to keep the domain system up and running. “We compete and are comrades in the internet mess. We will all fall apart if we don’t work together,” he said. As it turned out, being part of the whole New York infrastructure community didn’t hurt either.
