I am wondering about something for my domain. I am sure some of you might know about my question. I have a web host that I am very happy with, but it like any other service goes down once in a while. I also have another host for different purposes that is not in use right now.

I am wondering if I add the DNS records for slots 3 and 4 of the DNS on my domain, then will that be like backup hosting. I am asuming that it would go to my good host (records 1 and 2) first. If my good host was down, would it go to my 2nd host (DNS records 3 and 4). This would theoretically eliminate downtime, unless both of them are down, which wouldn't happen probably.

Would this work without screwing anything up? Has anyone ever done this? Thanks a lot for your help. I emailed tech support, but they didn't seem to understand what I was saying. Thanks again.

I thought the same way but my tests failed; meaning when I shutdown the server hosting ns1 and ns2 the domain was down too :(

Probably I didn't do it right :)

Has anyone else done this. Any input is appriciated. Thanks in advance.

Does anyone know about this? Thanks again. :)

Originally posted by Ajb1
Has anyone else done this. Any input is appriciated. Thanks in advance.


Yes, it can be done. One website on two web hosts.

There are multiple ways you can provide redundancy, round robin DNS is one way, though it's not perfect.

Another way I suppose is if you had your website on 2 different web servers and you also had those 2 machines acting as the authoritative DNS servers for your domain, you could keep seperate zone files on each server with information pointing back to itself with a small TTL. Depending on which DNS server was queried you'd get a different response and web requests would be pointed back to itself. If one went down, the other server would answer all DNS queries, and point requests for webpage access to itself as well.

Thats what I'm talking about. I have two web hosts and I have the site on each. When one goes down the other will come up. I am wondering if the domain will go to my 1st and 2nd DNS records before it goes to my 3rd and 4th, which would be the other host. This way, my domain will always go to host 1 first (which I want) and if host 1 is down, then it will go to host 2 (DNS records 3 and 4). Will this work?

No, that won't work, DNS queries don't work like that. Basically if you have 4 different NS servers as authoritative for a domain, one will be picked at random to do a lookup from, instead of always using the one listed first.

Thanks, I guess I can't do this then.

But if you do it like this :

Your NS is the same machine as your WWW server.

So, you basicaly use two servers, 2 NS & 2 WWW .. if one goes down it can't be queried for DNS, so you have to query the other one ...

Simple nah :)

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28780