Website Failover

[TSellers]

Wow, that was fast, you're spoiling me, thanks for that.

Weird, I had looked under manage domain, but not under 'new'.

I'm thinking that maybe I'm out of luck though as I guess I cannot redirect to a URL. I wanted to redirect to our google apps site as I'm giving up our second DSL line and reverting to one static IP, getting tired of running servers for the small number of non-critical sites that we have.

[editDNSeval]

Originally Posted by TSellers

Wow, that was fast, you're spoiling me, thanks for that.

Weird, I had looked under manage domain, but not under 'new'.

I'm thinking that maybe I'm out of luck though as I guess I cannot redirect to a URL. I wanted to redirect to our google apps site as I'm giving up our second DSL line and reverting to one static IP, getting tired of running servers for the small number of non-critical sites that we have.

I will have to defer to Support on that ....

IMHO it might have worked only if you had a single IP for the google apps site, but I don't know enough about that environment, etc.

[TSellers]

Thanks very much.

I'm wondering if there could be some trick by using the domain forwarding feature offered by OpenSrs for our domains registered with them. For example, if I invoke domain forwarding for the domain I enter the Opensrs forwarding IP in the A record for the domain, if domain forwarding is turned on for that domain, then any requests to 64.99.64.37 will forward to a new destination URL.

So now I'm thinking if I go to the domain, I stop using the OpenSrs DNS service for the domain and switch all nameservers to EditDNS. BUT, I leave Domain Forwarding turned on. Then in the failover window, I add the OpenSrs domain forwarding IP 64.99.64.37 as the second failover IP address. Unless I've missed something, in theory that should work. I'll give it a try.

The other option of course is to run a server in a cloud at AMazon Web Services. But I've been running a machine in AWS to use as a seedbox and it gets too expensive to run it 24/7, so I just use it for a few hours a couple of times a week. Also you have to pay extra to get a dedicated IP for your CLoud Computer.

[TSellers]

OK, I've set up a website that we never really use that's been down for 2 years anyway to test the domain forwarding/failover technique described above. However in order to test the domain I just realized that I read that the failover service just looks for the status of port 80 on the primary IP, so do I need to shut the whole server down, or can I just stop the website in IIS so it is not reachable and leae the other websites running while I try testing the failover?

[typoworx]

Dear EditDNS-Team,

the awesome "Website Failover"-Feature is just what I've been waiting / missing for on EditDNS. Great work - I'll test it soon.

I still know my money has been placed on right place for my lifetime subscription on this great service! Go on ;-)

Best regards
Gabriel | Typoworx

[TSellers]

Now that some of the settings have had time to propagate the failover to our Google Apps website as the backup site seems to be working by using domain forwarding feature offered by the registrar. The reason it works seems to be because their domain forwarding is invoked by placing an IP address in your A record, then you can forward to a URL.

So as I see that EditDNS also has forwarding as an option, would it be feasible to also set up that feature so you could also URL forward by using a forwarding IP, so if you want to URL forward you put the IP in your A record? That way if you just wanted to forward in the event of a failover, you could set up forwarding based on an IP, put the URL Forward IP in as your second 'failover' IP and leave your regular IP in as your A record in your zone. That's what I'm presently doing using our registrar's domain forwarding option and it appears to work with EditDNS Failover.

[rusty]

A question I have is, is there a need to wait for the failover IP to propagate? I can't see why you guys would be so excited if it wasn't instantaneous. Just wanted to confirm as this sounds too good to be true. Thanks.

[TSellers]

The propagate I was referring to were the DNS zone data from new authorative servers for the domain through the TLD root servers, not failover.

The failover seems to be within a minute. In the time I have been using it it has seemed to work flawlessly. When it is redirecting from a server that could be down for hours, to me that is acceptable.

The combination of using the auto failover from EditDNS with IP forwarding at the registrar makes it a perfect solution that works for me. If your registrar does not offer IP forwarding for a domain and you need that, then you probably have to use one of the other DNS services that will allow you to failover to a URL instead of an IP, and are more expensive.