GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - Managed DNS services any good ones out there?

fiveyes · 09-18-2002, 12:18 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by <IMX>
fiveyes--
Damn..
So who did you end up going with?

Looking into ZoneEdit, but it'll be a few days before I commit (that first go-round has made me a bit wary!)

Can't help but think that I can find a dns fail-over solution that won't end up costing me more than 7 times the cost of the two dedicated machines involved. God forbid I'd ever think of adding a third box, eh.

It was asked before, "Why would anyone consider such a service?" Well, here's my reasoning:

I have two dedicated boxes, using different ISP's and located half a continent away from each other. The chance of both failing at the same time is very slim.

With (say) 20 active domains, the idea is to run 10 on each box, statically splitting the bandwidth between the two.

Both boxes run a rsync daemon and each have overlapping hourly crontabs, so the boxes' web doc trees are being mirrored 48 times a day. This takes care of both site updates as well as message forums being reflected.

On top of this is the fail-over DNS service, that montiors both boxes. If either goes down, the 10 domains on the affected box are automatically routed to the other box, which then begins handling requests for all 20 of the domains. I am also contacted at that time to let me know that the system is limping on one box.

As soon as I can bring the other box back up, the fail-over server begins splitting the traffic as before.

Now, let's say the box went down because of hard disk failure, requiring a disk swap and complete restore (which actually happened to me last month and resulted in a bit over half a week downtime). I just bring it back to original specs by replacing the configuration files with copies for that machine, rsync the current web docs over from the running box (which is a LOT faster than using ftp to upload one's sites from a local machine!) and THEN the fail-over server begins its magic again.

All of this is transparent to the surfer and results in no more than 5 minutes of down time for any server failure- excepting that slim possibility of both boxes going down at the same time. An even greater degree of safety can be had with additional boxes in the configuration and dynamic load balancing is possible as well.