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The RcodeZero DNS Anycast service from ipcom, a nic.at sister company, has been around for over ten years. During this time, the product has developed rapidly from an Austrian inhouse security service to a top international player. The service started with six server locations, and today there are more than 40 worldwide. Read the most important development steps of RcodeZero DNS below:

Relaunch of the RcodeZero DNS web interface and introduction of user management. The relaunch of the web interface not only brings modern design, but also improved usability and new user management. In the future the web interface will be extended with additional features.

In July 2021, the rollout of additional new bare metal servers takes place. The number of customers is also growing steadily, with another major registrar joining in summer 2021: united-domains AG, a subsidiary of United Internet, uses ipcom's Anycast service to secure its 1.6 million domains. Meanwhile, more than 20 international top-level domains (TLDs)  and numerous Internet Service Providers and companies use the Anycast service.

More security for RcodeZero DNS: Since December 2020, the Anycast network has also been protected from DDoS attacks by another independent DDoS mitigation provider. After a long evaluation, ipcom chooses the product "Magic Transit" from Cloudflare.

In 2020, ipcom introduces dedicated systems for Anycast DNS. "Before that, all customers ended up on the same system. If one customer was attacked, everyone suffered along with them. Now we have dedicated systems that we use for customers with 50,000 domains or more. The customer gets their own system and is completely independent," says Klaus Darilion about this milestone.

Two more important top-level domains – .eu and .ею – are added in August 2019. EURid, the registry for the .eu top-level domains, the Cyrillic equivalent .ею, and the Greek extension .ευ use RocdeZero DNS for their approximately 3.6 million domains. "These TLDs are all significantly larger than us. That's a sign that they trust us. As a registry, we know what registries need," says Richard Wein, CEO.

The biggest customer so far chooses the RcodeZero DNS network: The Dutch domain registry SIDN uses the Anycast service for all .nl, .amsterdam, .aw and .politie domains managed by SIDN. It is the third largest European top-level domain registry with more than six million domains. Roelof Meijer, SIDN CEO, explains the reasons why RcodeZero DNS won the bid: “On the one hand, it was important for us to have a partner under EU jurisdiction and with European data protection standards. Furthermore, we were impressed by the technical know-how and flexibility at nic.at, with a view to developing the product according to our needs.“

Five years after the launch of RcodeZero DNS, a second cloud for Secondary DNS is introduced. “With our second cloud, we have set up a completely separate system for two independent IP addresses. If one site stops working, you can switch to another,“ explains Klaus Darilion.

The DNSSEC signing service is introduced the following year, a security extension that guarantees the authenticity and completeness of DNS transactions. “This was a big milestone for us,“ says Klaus Darilion, Head of Operations. “DNSSEC is technically very complex and we found a good and stable solution. The recipe for success is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to use.“

Both interest and the number of customers grow steadily. Just a few months after launching the product, ipcom increases server capacity and the service is expanded to nine locations.

In its first year, ipcom also succeeds in gaining Internet service providers as customers for RcodeZero DNS.

"The fact that we were able to gain a foothold in the secondary Anycast market was an important step for us. To this day, we continue to develop special solutions for Internet service providers to integrate our service into their processes and workflows. This is one of our strengths," says Robert Schischka, technical director.

Shortly after the launch of RcodeZero DNS, Hungary .hu becomes the first TLD to use ipcom‘s Anycast service. "We were able to supply Hungary at that time despite strong competition from much larger providers. From then on, there was a constant growth of customers," says Alexander Mayrhofer, Head of Research & Development.