Multi-servers - One domain name

[seihes]

Hello,

I'm quite new to web hosting so bear with simple mistake, please...

I need to have the same website on several servers, which means I have to cope with sharing a single domain name between the servers, and also with synchronizing the different servers between themselves.

As to synchronizing the stuff, I think I can just write a program that would run on a specific event or time on the servers, though something might already exists. Any information on that point is welcome.

How can I have several servers, i.e. two or more physical servers (we suppose that they have the same content, since it's synchronized), under the same domain name?

Do I only have to specify the different name server to the domain name registrar? What if I can only submit two of them and I have three or more servers?

Thank you very much for any help.

Seihes

[ARTzWeb.net]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but being a tucows.com domain reseller, it is impossible to assign several different nameservers for a domain name. It is only possible to set a single DNS server as primary/secondary nameserver and then you can optionally enter 4 other nameservers to be used in the event the primary/secondary are down.

[alex042]

Sounds like what you're trying to do is similar to load balancing.

Create an account with the domain on each server then just add additional 'a' records for each server for the domain in DNS. i.e. domain.com a 111.111.111.111, domain.com a 222.222.222.222, etc.

With this setup, when you type in domain.com, DNS should cycle through the servers and direct traffic to one of the IP's listed. Hopefully all sites are synced up most of the time or people may pull an old copy of the site if it happens to hit a server that hasnt been updated.

You can also do this with mail, but since mail is updated more often, syncronizing mail records between servers may become troublesome.

As for your nameservers, you may want to run 1 nameserver per physical server up to 4 nameservers or so.

[GordonH]

Hello
The problem with round rob in DNS (having several A records) is that every alternate request by the same user will go to a different server so the synch needs to be in real time and all the servers need to be up.
If one of them is down he will get 404 errors.


Most companies either do it round robin or they actually have lots of servers in the same place and run them off the one IP or range of A records.
There are very few real multiple geographically seperate server set ups.
Those that exist often have complex IP routing which is "not for the likes of us"!

[gRF]

seihes - Maybe you can try DNS Made Easy - they have 'fail-over' system which will change A record of the domain if the main server doesn't respond within 10-30 sec.

[seihes]

Woa... I didn't really expect somebody to answer me! Thanks pals...

I see, I didn't think that the requests might alternately go to another server.

I'm trying to have two servers at different places synched. And I don't think I can actually synch them in real time, unless I use a lot of bandwidth, which is something I would try to avoid; at least I don't want to use the bandwidth for that.

The thing is, my website will use forms and stuff. So either I'll have to make sure that the visitor, in some way, "sticks" to one server, or make the forms in such a way, that it doesn't matter on which server the variables are sent. I think I like the latter solution more... I wouldn't make complicated scripts and I can actually "round rob", as you say, the servers.

As to the "complex ip routing", can you lead me to any source of information? I'm sure I won't do it, but I'm interested.

Thanks a lot anyway. It was fast and efficient!
Seihes