A few months ago I had a chat with Nominum marketing chief Albert Gouyet, during which he produced a surprising statistic – eight percent of all Domain Name System (DNS) lookups come from the MySpace web site.

The DNS is the internet’s phone book. It maps domain names to IP addresses, which means I don’t have to remember the IP address for Google’s web site, I just have to type www.google.com. Considering the number of internet users around the globe, that nearly one in 10 DNS requests is coming from MySpace is remarkable, and it could be troubling for carriers who may need to add more hardware to deal with the increased traffic.

According to DNS inventor and Nominum chief scientist Paul Mockapetris, DNS traffic in some of the larger carrier networks is doubling every six months.

DNS is a critical service and something users just take for granted. They don’t need to worry about the fact that it can take hundreds of DNS lookups to pull together all the elements that make up their MySpace page.

Carriers, however, are becoming increasingly aware of the strain this kind of Web 2.0 traffic is having on their networks. They know that if they do not invest more in DNS servers, their services will deteriorate and their customers will soon be looking to switch providers.

Similarly with that other critical network service, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which, as Mockapetris said, is the starter motor for your network. If it “breaks”, your device does not get an IP address and you don’t get network access.

Do you think that rickety old DNS/DHCP server in the corner, which hasn’t been touched for years, could handle a power outage in your offices? Even a small blip could mean it crashing and rebooting. If it’s in a large enterprise and everybody’s on an IP phone, then the server could be swamped with IP address requests, or all the IP phones could be trying to get configuration codes from your Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, which also just happens to be running on that ancient server – nightmare. It could keep crashing and having to reboot as network requests keep flooding in. Nasty.

Do scenarios like this happen only once? Maybe, but remember this quote from Ian Fleming’s classic James Bond novel Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” This could well describe the CEO’s actions if DNS failures occur three times.

Have a shufty at your invisible, but critical services. It’s better than Oddjob turning up.