Redirection

[geoffb]

I was affected earlier with the outage at the Bluewater Datacentre ...
and it got me thinking that because our website was down, I couldn't inform people that we were having problems, and not actually scarpered !!

I would have been handy to show either our facebook / twitter / blog page to explain the problem.

Can anyone help in explaining how to forward to a different page.

From what I understand if I repointed the DNS this could take ages to change some ISPs, is there a way that if the site didnt load it would automatically point to a different site, as it was there was nothing not even an error page

is there a simple way to do this ...

Thanks
Geoff

 

[OldWelshGuy]

no sadly there isn't. There are ways to do it as long as your server is Ok, but the instant your server goes down, you are dead in the water.

 

[JEdge]

no sadly there isn't. There are ways to do it as long as your server is Ok, but the instant your server goes down, you are dead in the water.

Well that depends where his domain is hosted.
If it is hosted with another provider such as GoDaddy then you can create an A record for when your host goes now, this will mean however you will need 2 servers.

The only way to do a true redirection requires access to the servers apache files such as .htaccess.

~Jack

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Well that depends where his domain is hosted.
If it is hosted with another provider such as GoDaddy then you can create an A record for when your host goes now, this will mean however you will need 2 servers.

The only way to do a true redirection requires access to the servers apache files such as .htaccess.

~Jack

I agree jack, but what he was asking was can he arrange an automatic re-direction when the data centre goes down.

Well the answer there AFAIK is no, because there is nothing you can do as the data centre is donw. I am not a hosting expert, but I can't see how he can do anything within say 'godaddy' if godaddy is down as he will not have access to the control panel.

 

[Posilan]

It can be done using high availability load balacing web servers, although it's not a trivial setup and costs would probably be beyond most small websites.

You could use a load balanced cluster of 2 or more Apache servers using ultra monkey. You can load balance 2 load balancers as well using heartbeat so there isnt a single point of failure.

You would need several dedicated servers on diverse networks/locations linked via VPN to acheive this.

Steve

 

[leemason]

DNS records get propagated based on the TTL (Time To Live) set for the zone they are in.

If you have a co-operative company managing your DNS record they can reduce the TTL and the change the record. This will at least speed up the time in which the change will be propagated.

For a more detailed explanation of this sort of thing have a look here: http://www.technologytricks.com/speed-up-dns-propagation/

 

[Posilan]

If you have a co-operative company managing your DNS record they can reduce the TTL and the change the record. This will at least speed up the time in which the change will be propagated.

The problem with this though is that the TTL has to be set to a lower number amd the old TTL maximum time has to pass before this will work 100%, otherwise anyone with a cache of the DNS will still see the old A record.

Sure, it would work for anyone using an ISP or network immediately where the old record had expired, but thats probably a minority.

This is why anyone planning to change DNS such as web servers or email servers should change the TTL for the domain name down to around 1-5 minutes a couple of days (or at least the old TTL time) before carrying out the work to avoid any downtime or lost email.

Steve

 

[OldWelshGuy]

The problem with all this is that this is a guy who has a website that wants a sinple solution (which doesn't exist AFAIK)

 

[Posilan]

The problem with all this is that this is a guy who has a website that wants a sinple solution (which doesn't exist AFAIK)

Quite agree. The best you can do for a basic setup is to make sure the web host or upstream provider has a good track record of uptime with a half decent level of redundancy and hope it stays that way.

Steve

 

[leemason]

Dyndns amongst other can provide very fast propagation as part of their service. So if you want DNS records to be updated very quickly have a look for such a provider. UltraDNS is another that offers very fast propagation.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

But doesn't all this require human intervention? there is no way to make a cheap automatic solution is there?