Because of the outages that we experienced at Opsource for a high profile site and recent maintenance notices I’ve received from another hosting provider that I use, I’ve started looking into fail-over options. In my head I figured there had to be a way to monitor a website and if that website goes down, to dynamically re-route traffic to another server. I’m not talking about the typical load balancing of multiple servers on the same network, I’m talking about a DNS fail-over system. After a couple of google searches I stumbled upon bindmon, an open-source project that does exactly what I was looking for - monitor servers and dynamically change DNS upon failure. But I wanted to see if I could find a hosted solution. A few more searches and I stumbled on UltraDNS which handles DNS traffic management and DNS failover. They seem perfect, but I wanted to do one more search to see if I could find a “free” solution for my own personal sites. That’s when I found ZoneEdit.com. Their website is pretty sparse, so it worried me a little bit, but a few google searches turned up a lot of references to their site across the internet with both good and bad reviews. An idea I have is to use a DNS management/failover service that points to a custom blog at Tumblr upon server failure. Why Tumblr? Because it’s free and they allow CNAME pointers.
Anyone have experience with DNS failover services at ZoneEdit or any other free DNS management service?
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