Oracle buys hosted DNS provider Dyn

Software giant Oracle will buy hosted domain name resolution service provider Dyn to help its cloud customers to optimise their infrastructure costs and performance.

Dyn was set up by four undergraduate students 15 years ago to provide remote access and print services for lab computers. The company moved onto free domain name service provision first as DynDNS, and then created the premium DynECT paid-for option.

Today Dyn's customers include large internet properties such as Spotify, Netflix, Twitter as well as traditional businesses like Pfizer.

Although part of its business offering includes protecting customers against service disruptions, Dyn itself came under a severe denial of service attack last month.

The attack on Dyn by the Mirai botnet disrupted a large part of the internet in the United States and Europe.

Oracle president of product development Thomas Kurian said Dyn would supplement the company's enterprise infrastructure and platform-as-a-service businesses.

“Dyn’s immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform,” Kurian said.

Oracle did not disclose how much it paid for Dyn.