Advise Please

[thepremier]

We don't know how to use 4 nameservers properly. Meaning that 2 nameservers belong to one provider (dedicated server) and the last 2 nameservers to another provider (dedicated server).

What we need:

if the first server that host our websites goes down, then automatically the traffic is sent to the second server.

If we add 4 nameservers to an domain, it is working like described above?

Thank you for your help.

[Chicken]

Though you'd think that would work, but I believe in practice people have posted that this type of automatic switching doesn't work. Someone did post that a multiple A Record (two different IPs) worked, but you'd have to test that to confirm.

[thepremier]

thank you for the info

[blue27]

This is a response to the same question, on a different forum.


I think what you are wanting to do is have a copy of the websites hosted by your existing provider (ns1 and ns2) and a copy of the websites hosted with us (ns3 and ns4), so that if your current provider goes down your sites would still be online. Correct?

I hate to tell you, but unfortunately this isn't how the DNS system operates. When ns1, ns2, ns3 and ns4 are all online it would route to whatever name server was closest to the client requesting the web page and not simply ns1 and ns2 and then only divert to ns3 and ns4 when ns1 and ns2 are unavailable. As a result, this can cause problems if you have dynamic content being served from things such as MySQL databases, as it can become out of sync between the two providers.

To achieve this kind of redundancy you would require either a load balanced / clustered solution or a round-robin DNS setup. It's not quite as simple as adding a couple of more name servers to achieve redundancy.

[Cow]

I'd recommend trying to go the round-robin DNS route. It's a tad easier and less expensive than a clustered solution if you're on a tight budget.