Outages. The plague of the internet. We’ve all seen it happen year after year—sites go down, for minutes, even hours. Some even a day or more! If you haven’t been affected by this while doing business or as a casual user, you must not get online much. And in the new “COVID” world, who doesn’t get online these days?

Let me ask you this: 

If commerce, work, education, and play are becoming ever-reliant on online-based platforms, why do organizations still accept outages as “part of doing business online?”

Of course, there are times when system failures are beyond the scope of DNS. However, most outages can be prevented with Failover, taking advantage of multiple content delivery networks (CDNs), or having secondary DNS. 

Why Failover and Multi-CDN is Vital to Your Job and Your Company

Still, many companies either don’t know about these options or think they’re fine without them—until they’re not. The truth is, your DNS strategy plays a huge role in how your day-to-day might pan out. Consider the following scenarios. 

Behind door number one: Pandemonium. 

Fielding customer complaints and scrambling to get your networks back online while hundreds of thousands of dollars go down the drain due to an outage or a slow, overwhelmed network. Who’s to blame? The IT department, naturally.

Behind door number two: The company that uses Constellix. 

Knocking out tasks, brainstorming ideas with your team, making the company money, feeling secure in your job, and having an all-around good day. Who gets the credit for keeping your networks running smoothly? The IT department, who else? Well, maybe your boss for hiring such superstars for his or her team, but YOU know your contributions (wink).

See where I’m going with this? 

Unless you’re a stress junkie who loves the feeling of the walls caving in around you (more power to you if that’s the case), I think most would agree that door number two sounds more appealing than door number one.

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Failover and Multi-CDN are key ingredients in the success of your DNS strategy. And in today’s climate, I would argue that they play a key role in your company’s overall success as well. If your domain can’t stay online or you have slow network speeds, there’s plenty of competition out there that can and will meet the needs of your customers.

The Power of Failover With Constellix

While many providers offer Failover as a service, including our sister company DNS Made Easy, Constellix offers the most robust, feature-rich Failover service in the industry when paired with our Sonar Monitoring Suite and Real-Time Detection Anomaly (RTTAD) service.

Failover is also natively integrated into our most popular DNS services. Once you enable Failover for your records (A, AAAA, ANAME, and CNAME are supported), your traffic will automatically be diverted to the fastest and healthiest resource available in the event your primary server goes down. 

As an extra precaution, we also verify that your backup servers are up and running before redirecting your traffic. This way, you can be confident that your end users aren’t inadvertently sent to another unhealthy resource—no one wants that!

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Types of DNS Failover Configurations

There are three Failover options in Constellix. Normal, Off On Any Failover, and One Way. These options allow you to configure Failover based on the unique needs of your domain(s). We afford you ultimate control and flexibility while keeping your services up and running with zero downtime.

Normal (always lowest level)

By default, when you enable Failover, it will be set to “Normal.” This just means that we will always try to keep your primary IP address pointed to the preferred system in your list of backup servers.

Off On Any Failover

With this option enabled in your Failover configuration, if your primary IP goes down, we will send traffic to an active IP address and Failover will be disabled. You can then manually trigger your traffic to be redirected to your preferred system at a time of your choosing.

One Way (move to higher level)

With Failover configured as “One Way,” your queries will Failover to the next healthy resource in your list and will not revert back to your primary IP unless you change it manually. An example would be if IP address #1 is down, your traffic will failover to #2, but if #2 is down as well, your traffic will failover to #3, and so on. This would be helpful if your servers would need to be reconfigured prior to using again.

Failover with Multi-CDN 

While we do not offer CDN as a separate service, we do provide a sophisticated management suite that lets you manage all your CDNs in one place. In other words, we play nice with others and don’t bully the other kids on the playground. 

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Did you know?: With our GeoProximity service, you can essentially build your own CDN without even having one with another provider? It’s pretty cool, actually. 

Having a single CDN in place will certainly provide a performance boost for your network, but it will still be highly susceptible to outages. You can circumvent this issue by implementing multiple CDNs. That way, if one of your CDNs goes down, your resources will be sent from your backup provider, just like with regular Failover.

Our Multi-CDN management service includes baked-in Failover. As soon as an outage or slowdown is detected, we automatically shift traffic to the healthiest and fastest resource. Constellix also features location-specific CDN. Utilizing a combination of GeoDNS and load balancing, this option lets you steer your traffic to servers based on location, performance, or where it’s most cost-effective for your business.

Why Choose Constellix Over Other Providers?

With all the available options and such an economical price point, configuring Failover or Multi-CDN for your domain(s) is truly a no-brainer. Having backup servers keeps your business protected and connected. 

It prevents your bottom line from taking a hit due to outages or a slow performing server. It shields your brand’s reputation. And most importantly—it keeps your customers happy.  

Why Constellix? 

For starters, our infrastructure was developed based off of real customer feedback and was purposefully designed to make the lives of  IT professionals easier. We also provide proprietary solutions you won’t find anywhere else in the industry.

And, with servers strategically placed at 42 locations worldwide, 20 points of presence (PoPs), nearly 300 Gpbs of peering capacity (with an additional 200 Gpbs coming soon), and more than 100 monitoring nodes—we got your back. 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic. - Arthur C. Clarke (Author)