I’ll keep it simple:
We’re stuck on an unreliable server for the next few months thanks to a company-wide promotion we’re running (we can’t have any down time due to the large # of customers hitting the website. We’re a national restaurant chain).
We have a simplified backup website we’d like to host on a separate web host and use a dual DNS/IP routing service to automatically switch to the backup host if our main site goes down. That way, we don’t have thousands of customers seeing a 404 and at least know that the site will be back shortly.
So if I want to use HostGator as a backup host, how do I register with an existing domain? Our domain currently resides in its own service and the DNS points to the proper server. Can I still register at HostGator under that domain now, and not have to worry about anything changing?
In other words, I don’t want to suddenly point to the HostGator account. I don’t think it will, but I want to be sure.
It’s been a long week and I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this right now
There’s a DNS provider out there that offers dns loadbalancing/failover and a few other things but I don’t remember it working very well
Apache has a few modules that can redirect users to a different page when it hits a certain threshold, i think mod_cban and mod_evasive can do this at least
Whats the issue with the server and it is actually crashing?
You could always setup another server in the same DC and write a heartbeat script to arp the IP over to the #2 server
Yes, I’ve done that numerous times. It won’t start pointing to the new host till you change your DNS and point to Hostgator …
If you have the hardware it might be easier to point to a temp DNS server that will dish out the IP to the old site then you can make the switch over yourselves/test after hours/weekends/what ever. When it needs to be made permanent you just point the domain to the Host gator DNS
Thanks for the responses. Everything you’ve said makes total sense and I feel like an idiot for even having needed to ask that question. Long week….
Some notes:
The backup dealio is a just a single page thing with some of our business essentials like a store locator, menu, contact info, etc. If we’re down for an hour, we can potentially lose thousands of dollars in business if people can’t find our stores.
HostGator actually won’t be our new permanent host. Our website is ASP.NET based and actually needs a pretty robust VDS or dedicated server to run well. We deal with A LOT Of heavy traffic periods and a lot interactivity. We have some great hosting sites in-town we’re exploring.
The problem is the company we hired to host and manage our server ended up just reselling us hosting on GoDaddy, and their VDS/VPS environment isn’t mature enough to be stable for us. To the tune of 14 hours of otal down time in the last 3 months. And we were promise 99.99%
So, needless to say, we’re getting out of the contract with that company and finding our own hosting. The HostGator backup plan is just for a few months until our promotion ends and we can safely move to a better server.
As for the domain itself, it’s housed internally and we’re going to set up a failover to direct the domain to the backup server if the main server stops responding. It’s a pretty instantaneous thing, but of course, DNS doesn’t update immediately, so it’s not perfect.
Once we’re set up on a new (and reliable) server, we’ll use this backup site possibly in the same manner, but we’re moving to a cat-5 tier-1 facility (), so I don’t anticipate any server outages. Load balancing will be set up and we should be fine. Thus, we’ll probably have the backup site as something to have in case the main website goes down, whether planned or unplanned.
Bleh, that’s a mouthful. TGIF
I’d love to pick y’all’s brains on this, if I may…
What other options do we have for an instant server switch like I’ve described? The DNS failover isn’t any more effective than if we were to switch the DNS ourselves. Even with a low TTL, it could take a while to update for customers.
An idea: Since a DNS essentially interprets a domain and then points to an IP, then what about a system that basically monitors a main IP and backup IP. If the main IP is unavailable, it routes to the backup IP? Without changing the DNS for the domain, of course. Is this possible with two separate physical servers? Or is it possible at all?
Why would it take a while to update if you have a low TTL??
If it was set to 3 days and they just got the record yeah it’ll take 3 days till it asks again but if you set it low now when there is no issue, when there is an issue it won’t take 3 days …