Website Failover

[tyler]

OK, those should now be fixed too.

[sdawson]

Thanks, I will let you know if it happens again.

[sdawson]

Much better now. Thank you.

[tyler]

Thanks for your help troubleshooting!

[PistoGanza]

Tell me please how I can configure additional options for "Website Failover", for example,
- Website not available after 3 errors in 5 minutes.
- Error Type: not HTTP 200 code, connection timeout, checking the existence of key words on the page.

[editDNSeval]

Originally Posted by tyler

EditDNS.net now offers website failover, it's something we've been working on for a while now and just finished up.

What does it do?

It will monitor your primary website, in the event it detects it down it will automatically switch to another IP so your visitors never know your website is down.

Other providers charge $5-$10/per website for this service, we included it for free in all of our EditDNS.net subscription packages.

Tyler & team ( ) great job! I didn't see this announcement but saw it in the menu one day about a week or so ago and set it up (it said Beta then) on about 10 or so domains.

The failover works like a charm!

Questions though:

1) If you have this setup and have another provider as secondary will they seemlessly fetch the update? (i.e., it appears to do a TTL of 0? So does that basically mean that instead of caching those hosts they would come to EditDNS on every dns hit?)

2) Along the same lines, is it possible that larger providers may still cache the results and ignore this anyway?

I am just curious.

Thanks for providing this -- great value!

I have one more pet request, but I will ask for it in another thread as it is unrelated to this.

[tyler]

If you're using slave DNS (Where someone grabs our records) it's not going to work out very well.

As far as DNS caches, there's some ISPs that can cache records so it's not going to redirect 100% of the people, however the majority of them will see your 'failover site'

[editDNSeval]

Originally Posted by tyler

If you're using slave DNS (Where someone grabs our records) it's not going to work out very well.

As far as DNS caches, there's some ISPs that can cache records so it's not going to redirect 100% of the people, however the majority of them will see your 'failover site'

OK, that's what I was afraid of (re: it not going to work out very well).

I configured it anyway but will have to test some more ... it really would be better than setting up failover/high-availability at the individual sites (especially since what we really want is WAN to WAN failover between to unrelated providers/locations -- which theoretically your solution provides since it occurs at the DNS request; assuming your infrastructure doesn't go down).

Cheers

[TSellers]

Presently adding my first domain in order to test Failover service. However I cannot find where in the interface to implement and set this feature up?

[editDNSeval]

TSellers: unfortunately it is not so obvious. Here is a quick howto:

1) Edit one of your domains
2) Hover over Menu Option "Manage Domain"
3) Select submenu choices "Add New" and then "Website Failover"
4) You will then be presented by several fields:
"We will monitor your website for you, every 5 minutes to determine if your website is still up. In the event we detect your website no longer is available we will automatically switch the IP for you, so your customers don't notice you're currently down.

Notify Me:
We will notify you by email in the event we detect your website down and that we have switched the IP for you, automatically. We will also notify you when you are back up.

Don't Switch Back:
If you choose this, we will not fail back to the original IP, once we fail to the secondary IP.

Hostname: .xx.com
The hostname field is the host you want to failover, usually it will be www.xx.com or xx.com Feel free to leave it blank if you wish to do failover for xx.com.

Primary IP:
This will be your primary IP of your web server -- we will be checking this IP every 5 minutes to determine if it's down or not. We will be checking on port 80 if the connection is alive or not.

Secondary IP:
This will be your secondary IP of your web server -- this is the IP we will switch to, in the event your primary no longer is accessible."

Hope this helps.