Outages Have Changed. So Have We.
The internet's failures used to be predictable: a server crashed, you restarted it. Today, domain registrars have company-wide outages. Fiber lines are cut by accident and by vandalism. Entire platforms vanish for an afternoon while their status pages insist everything is fine. We've stopped treating those as freak events and built a formal continuity policy around them — layered protection, honest limits, and a plan for the day something upstream of everyone fails.
We've Lived It
In August 2026, a DNS provider outage took a number of our clients' domains offline for hours — the websites were healthy the entire time, but the internet had no way to find them. Every affected domain was on a second provider by the end of the day, and redundant DNS became standard on every domain we register.
Layers, Not Luck
Two independent DNS providers on every domain we register. A standby front door in a separate datacenter with certificates issued in advance. Monitoring that lives outside our building and watches every nameserver and certificate individually. Each layer covers a different way things fail.
You'll Always Have Word
Our status page runs on separate infrastructure from everything else we operate. If something large fails, status.mcnairmedia.com is where we post what's happening, what we're doing, and what to expect — even if the rest of our systems are unreachable.
How Protected You Are Depends on What You Let Us Reach
We never require you to move anything. But the speed of recovery is determined by what we can touch when it counts — so here is the honest ladder, from everything-automatic to depends-on-a-phone-call.
Registered & Hosted With Us
Your domain runs on two DNS providers, monitoring watches it from outside, and failover to the standby front door needs no action from anyone — including you. This is the setup we recommend, and moving a domain to us is free. We can also set up your email — Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 — as part of the package.
Your Registrar, Your DNS Account
Keep your domain exactly where it is. You open a DNS account you own — Cloudflare, Amazon Route 53, or Azure DNS — and grant us narrowly-scoped access: enough to redirect your website in an emergency, nothing more. The grant takes about five minutes, we never touch your existing records to set it up, and you can revoke it any time. Cloudflare · Route 53 · Azure
Your Registrar, Our DNS
One nameserver change at your registrar points your domain at our redundant DNS pair, and from then on protection is automatic. We become your DNS desk — record changes go through us — which some clients prefer and some don't. Your registration and billing stay untouched, wherever they are.
Access Only
At minimum, we need standing access that lets us change one DNS record for you — a delegate login or a DNS panel account. With it, we can recover your site by hand during a sustained outage. Without it, there is nothing we can promise, and we'll say so rather than imply otherwise. Recovery in this tier depends on people being reachable, and it is measured in hours, not minutes.
What Actually Happens During an Outage
This is our operating policy for every client, regardless of setup. What differs between the tiers above is only how fast each step can happen.
Our response, in order
- Automatic protection engages immediately for every domain configured for it — no decision, no delay
- In the first hour we focus on restoration — most interruptions end quickly, and moving a domain during a short outage often causes more disruption than it prevents
- If the outage is sustained and the evidence says it will continue, we begin manual failover for every affected client — including domains we don't control
- Every step is posted to status.mcnairmedia.com as it happens
Five Things That Cost Nothing and Change Everything
Keeping your domain at another registrar is fine. These are the things that decide whether an emergency recovery takes an hour or doesn't happen at all — in rough order of value.
- Give us a named domain contact — one person, reachable out of hours, who can log in and change a DNS record. "The person who set up our website years ago" is not a contact.
- Lower your DNS TTL to 300 seconds — a one-time change that makes any future emergency redirect take effect in minutes instead of a day.
- Confirm your registrar login works — test it now, not during an incident, and include the recovery email.
- Keep the domain's contact email current — expiry notices go there, and an expired domain is a longer, uglier outage than any server failure.
- Or take one step up the ladder — transfer to us for free, or grant us scoped access on a DNS account you own. Either one turns every manual step above into an automatic one.
Where the Edges Are
This policy covers availability during an infrastructure outage. It does not cover a website breaking through its own code or content, an expired domain registration, security incidents like hacking or malware, email delivery problems beyond DNS, or failures inside a third-party service your site depends on. Those are separate matters, handled separately — and we will always tell you which one you're looking at.