Re: Handling Site Outages

["Milan Zdimal" <milanz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John,

We did DNS fail over at the previous company I work for -- DynIP. They
provide a service that monitors your connection. If you have a site
outage DynIP will detect that your connection is down and will change your
A/CNAME and even MX records to point to somewhere else. This works
relatively well and is used by a number of large companies. There are a few
draw backs however:

1. There is a 1-5 minute delay before your DNS entries are actually changed
to ensure that you are really offline (just in case it was a hick up)
2. DNS caching. If someone visited your site before the outage they may have
your old IP address cached for several minutes and in extreme cases hours.

If you're interested in learning more about this visit their site:
www.dynip.com. They don't aggressively advertise the fail over feature on
the site so give them a call. Ask for Mark Bisson or David Grant and tell
them Milan sent you. =)

Hope this helps.

Milan Zdimal

Home Office: (519) 541-1905
Cellular: (519) 490-0036
MSN: milanz@xxxxxxxxx

On 2/19/07, Jon Paris <Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'd be interested in hearing how folks here handle site-outages.
>
> For example when a system fails catastrophically or there's a power outage
> or whatever.
>
> Do you have a fall-back web site - and if so, how do you handle the DNS
> switching involved?
>
> Jon Paris
> Partner400
>
> www.Partner400.com
>
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