DNS, the Domain Name System, is a vital part of the Internet. And since it’s such a vital part of the Internet, it’s important that websites have correct DNS settings. If they don’t, it can lead to a number of problems, one of them being downtime. On top of that, bad DNS settings can be hard to track down and can cause a lot of head ache for webmasters and site owners.

We here at Pingdom run a website monitoring service that tracks the uptime of tens of thousands of websites for our users, so we deal with site issues on a daily basis. Over time, it has become exceedingly clear that a large portion of the various errors we detect are caused by bad DNS settings or poorly configured DNS servers.

This is why we now are introducing an addition to our free webmaster tools: a DNS health test.

Testing your website’s DNS settings for problems

This new test takes a domain name – that of your website, presumably, but you can test any domain name – and figures out which DNS servers it’s set up on, then makes sure that there are no strange settings that can cause problems.

It’s a very thorough test, so it should root out any issues that can cause you problems either now or down the line.