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I have some question regarding DNS root server.

  1. Where is it located ? In USA ? In europe ?

  2. Which company spends money to maintain dns root server ?

  3. What about fail-safety ? If root dns fails where is the backup server?

  4. Approximately how many requests does it serve per second ? How does it not get overloaded with requests ? is it loadbalanced?

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Most of the information can be found here: http://www.root-servers.org/

  1. There are several in different regions of the world, see link above for map
  2. There are 12 companies that operate them, they are funded by whatever their primary business is
  3. There are 13 root DNS servers, there is therefore redundancy
  4. The root servers aren't the ones that generally handle requests, they are primarily used for spreading DNS information so if I register XYZ.com and point is to my IP address, my provider will send it to the root server for it to be propagated. The root servers are surely load-balanced for the sheer volume of queries, I'm not sure on that exact number (approximate volume can be found here: https://www.isoc.org/briefings/020/), that being said DNS is extremely light weight and connection-less (UDP), a high volume application provider like twitter or facebook has much more powerful systems behind it.
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  • There's even more redundancy: most root nameservers are BGP anycasted setups with nodes all over the world (as can be seen on root-namservers.org). Should one node within a cluster fail, traffic will be rerouted to other nodes in that cluster.
    – Teun Vink ♦
    Oct 30, 2015 at 8:47

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