Web Server 911: IP Monitoring and Failover

On March 24, online encyclopedia giant Wikipedia went offline for more than 2 hours because of an overheating problem in one of their data centers. Even though they had had a DNS failover procedure, it was broken. The result: millions of users could not access Wikipedia for hours. This situation is unfortunate for Wikipedia, but it would be even more unfortunate if you were an online business that lost 2 hours of critical revenue. It is not enough to simply have a single back-up IP address and a manual switch to flip as a failover process. Wikipedia's outage serves to illustrate the need for not just a failover process, but an integrated approach to monitoring and IP failover services that ensures your Web sites will always be up and running as expected. Read Afilias' tips for IP failover best practices at http://www.afilias.info/node/428

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• DNS
• IP monitoring
• failover