Hello,

One of my reseller accounts, the primary domain I use with it is www.getfreereports.com, is down. The situation isn't resolved and there isn't any hope of resolution until Noon ET on Saturday, June 1st. I am not mentioning the host as they have been pretty good so far since I opened my account earlier this year.

Anyway, I am surprised by the lack of communication and processes involved with working the issue. That is a sidenote that I should start a new topic for.

The real question I have is what are my options?

I know I can sign up with McHost, Splashost, Voxtreme, etc. and have an account created tomorrow. I know I will have to move nameservers and wait for propogation. Knowing this, I understand that it may be 48 hours before I am able to get back up and running again.

Is there anything I can do to make this process quicker if the host goes down again? Dynamic DNS for my clients and domains?

I guess the bottomline is can I flip a magical switch and have them point to somewhere else without worrying about the domain changes have to propogate?

I appreciate your answers to this question!

You could have 2 accounts on 2 servers (with the same or with different hosts) and have 4 nameservers for your critical domains:

ns1.host1.com 123.123.123.123
ns2.host1.com 123.123.123.124
ns1.anotherhost.com 123.123.123.125
ns2.anotherhost.com 123.123.123.126

(You could also use ns1, ns2, ns3 and ns4.yourdomain.com)

It may still cause downtime for certain clients if the DNS is cached and a server goes down, but it should be max. 3-5 hours if any at all. Its not fail-safe, but certainly better than waiting 48 hours for propagation. Just make sure you always have the same content for both website on both servers. Hope this helps :)

Originally posted by Kiwi
Just make sure you always have the same content for both website on both servers. Hope this helps :)
and that could be a tad bit difficult for dynamically produced database driven sites. Difficult, but not impossible. :)

My idea would be to get a VSD somewhere that is _reliable_ and run your backup DNS from there. DNS requires very, very little bandwidth and space, do you won't need a lot of them.

Install and configure djbdns or BIND (bleh) and add all of your domains and IPs. Set the TTLs low so that if/when you change hosts again, your DNS zones will expire quickly and clients will pull the new IPs faster (30-90 minutes as opposed to 24-48 hours).

The only problem with this is the adding of domains. Everytime a customer/you adds a domain, it'll need to be added to your VSD server somehow. If you have your own DNS server configuration files on the reseller host, just make some scripts and use them with cron to update your VSD server automatically. If you don't have your own DNS server configuration files on the reseller host, find some other way to do it using the configuration files you do have access to.

It's just an idea -- it may or may not work (efficiently) for you. You certainly won't need four nameservers, though. Just ns1 -> reseller host and ns2 -> VSD or some other remote location.

You know maybe someone knows about this when you use CPanel!

For example i want to do this for a customer on two different servers but it seems even though this setup below should work it always looks at ns3.theredomain.com

e.g

they have theredomain.com with name servers being

Primary :ns1.theredomain.com
Secondary :ns2.theredomain.com
Third : ns3.theredomain.com
Fourth : ns4.theredomain.com


What i find is as soon as the ns3 and ns4 resolve they take over the account including email even thought ns1 and ns2 server is not down!

Why does it do this? Any ideas how this can be fixed?

I though maybe i have to edit the DNS of the main domain or something? Any suggestions would be much appreciated...

Kind regards,