DNS Made Easy’s DNS Failover solution can guarantee that as soon as your website ,service, or internet connection is offline, all your traffic will be automatically pointed over to a secondary IP address, server, or provider you have set up at another location.
How DNS Failover works
DNS Made Easy’s monitoring nodes constantly check (every 2 to 4 minutes) to make sure your primary system is responding. You can configure the monitoring systems to check if your service is running on either TCP, UDP, HTTP, or HTTPS protocols, and on any available port.
As soon as any of your services fail to respond from at least two of our monitoring locations, your monitored IP is considered offline. If used in conjunction with our System Monitoring service, an email will be sent immediately notifying your contact address on file of the outage.
The system then issues a check of your secondary IP to ensure it is responding before traffic is sent there. As long as your back-up IP is available the change of IP address is made using DNS Made Easy’s Peregrine Instant DNS Propagation.
We continue to monitor your primary IP address and will automatically failback appropriately once the IP address is back online based on your monitoring criteria.
NOTE: This service is integrated with the DNS Made Easy Enterprise Managed DNS solution. Your domain must be managed with our DNS services for you to use this product. No installation of additional scripts or services is not required, we take care of all the work for you.
What type of set up is required for DNS Failover?
DNS Failover and System Monitoring can be set up on any A records within your DNS configuration. Within the DNS Made Easy interface you would define the back up IP address, protocol and port to monitor as well as a notify email address for system monitoring if you wish.
How many back up IP addresses can I specify?
You can enter up to five (5) IP’s. If your first IP is down, then the system will check if the second IP is functional. If the second IP is not functional then the third IP will be checked, etc.
How quickly will my IP change?
This is dependent on the TTL of your record as well as cache on local resolving name servers of querying clients who accessed your IP recently. Records that use DNS Failover should have a short TTL between 180-300 seconds. This will minimize the amount of time the record caches in resolving name servers decreasing the amount of time it takes for your new IP to populate when an outage occurs. Clients who have not accessed your IP recently will reach the new IP instantly thanks to DNS Made Easy’s instant IP updates. Clients who accessed the IP before the change was made will have about a 10 minute wait until the cache expires and the new IP is populated.
What happens if my original IP comes back online?
This can be up to you. DNS Made Easy will continue to monitor your systems and as soon as your original IP come back online we can automatically move your traffic back to the original system. Otherwise, you can choose to have your record remain pointed to your secondary system until you manually change it back to the primary address. You would enable the Auto Off option for a manual failback. This can allow administrators to verify or make changes to the primary system before reverting traffic back.
