Back-up Host

We are currently looking for a back-up location for one of the website
that we are currently hosting. .

Www.ABCDE.com is hosted in one of our facility. We want a backup
hostsite for it. Would it be possible that one site to have two DNS -
1 primary , the other as backup? Say if the primary site server is
down, anyone accessing www.ABCDE.com will be redirected
(automatically) to another server in another location. This set-up is
what we need to understand.

I checked some hosting provider and what they are saying is we need to
propagate again the new DNS if the primary server will be done. What
we want is an automatic switch to the back-up. As if the server never
went down from the user's point of view.

Could you alpo reccommend a hosting service that can accomodate our
requirement?

Inputs on this is very much appreciated

David
Thu May 10 04:04:02 CDT 2007

If you want geographically isolated backup, then DNS propagation is
the only way, and it won't be automatic unless someone runs an agent
to ping your site and automatically makes DNS changes. DNS itself is
not going to do this automatic switching. I don't have host provider
recommendations, but you will have to look for "geographically
isolated backup".

Otherwise, you can look for host providers to that use network load
balancing to have N physical web servers service your website, such
that if one server goes down, the other N-1 servers pick up the
outstanding requests with no interruption of service (other than the
users on the server that went down at that moment).


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//






On May 10, 12:41 am, mj <spectrum_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> We are currently looking for a back-up location for one of the website
> that we are currently hosting. .
>
> Www.ABCDE.com is hosted in one of our facility. We want a backup
> hostsite for it. Would it be possible that one site to have two DNS -
> 1 primary , the other as backup? Say if the primary site server is
> down, anyone accessingwww.ABCDE.comwill be redirected
> (automatically) to another server in another location. This set-up is
> what we need to understand.
>
> I checked some hosting provider and what they are saying is we need to
> propagate again the new DNS if the primary server will be done. What
> we want is an automatic switch to the back-up. As if the server never
> went down from the user's point of view.
>
> Could you alpo reccommend a hosting service that can accomodate our
> requirement?
>
> Inputs on this is very much appreciated

_
Thu May 10 09:30:14 CDT 2007

DNS is not a tool to be used for any sort of failover (aside from the DNS
servers themselves). The ins and outs of the reasoning behind that are
complicated. Suffice to say, if you try it, it won't work.

The best you can do is mirror your files somewhere on a live web server and
leave your TTL down. Then, in the case of a failure of the primary site you
switch the IP address to the secondary site while you work on the primary
site.

If the site is worth having stay up and can't tolerate any downtime, then
it's worth buying your own IP address space and doing BGP routing for fast
fail over or getting redundant servers and a real failover system with it.

"mj" <spectrum_527@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1178782893.800962.300250@y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
> We are currently looking for a back-up location for one of the website
> that we are currently hosting. .
>
> Www.ABCDE.com is hosted in one of our facility. We want a backup
> hostsite for it. Would it be possible that one site to have two DNS -
> 1 primary , the other as backup? Say if the primary site server is
> down, anyone accessing www.ABCDE.com will be redirected
> (automatically) to another server in another location. This set-up is
> what we need to understand.
>
> I checked some hosting provider and what they are saying is we need to
> propagate again the new DNS if the primary server will be done. What
> we want is an automatic switch to the back-up. As if the server never
> went down from the user's point of view.
>
> Could you alpo reccommend a hosting service that can accomodate our
> requirement?
>
> Inputs on this is very much appreciated
>