DNS Bytes: Tip - Using Failover to Prevent Downtime for Internal Systems

Failover for Outage Prevention

If your organization relies heavily on the internet to serve its customers and/or for team members to perform their jobs, then you know the importance of uptime. In fact, one could easily argue that uptime is the single most crucial factor in conducting business in our modern age.

There’s always a lot of talk about the dreaded provider-related outage, but there are many times when an outage occurs due to internal system failures or planned system maintenance. Even when planned, downtime comes at a cost.

This can be prevented with DNS Failover.

DNS Failover Configuration Tip

When DNS Failover is configured for your domain, anytime your primary resource becomes unhealthy or unavailable, your web traffic is automatically redirected to a backup resource you’ve listed in your configuration. This is accomplished via health checks, which are performed at specified intervals that can range between every 30 seconds to a full day (depending on your provider). A unique attribute in Constellix (and sister company DNS Made Easy) is that we also verify the status and health of your backup endpoints before automatically diverting traffic, which prevents any unnecessary downtime.

For mission-critical services using Failover, we recommend setting your time to live (TTL) values between 30 and 300 seconds for ultimate availability.

Hands down, DNS Failover is one of the most efficient and cost-effective methods for ensuring your domain remains online in the event of an internal server failure. The truth is, no domain should be without it!