DNS Failover is a method of creating redundancy for your DNS records and servers. It’s important to keep in mind that the first server you create will be the primary, and all others will be secondary.
This means that if the primary goes down, then all requests go to the next one in line until it comes back up or you manually switch it back on.
A lot of people think this sounds like a good idea because they don’t want their site down when there’s an outage, but what about performance? In this article, you’ll learn how to create a cloud DNS failover for your server.
What is a DNS Failover?
Let’s first take a look at what exactly Amazon DNS failover is and why you would want to use it.
A lot of people don’t know that when working with multiple servers, your primary server will be the only one handling all requests until something happens.
If this machine goes down, then no other IPs can handle those same queries because they’re looking for an active IP address and not offline ones.
That means if someone tries to visit your website or send mail through their email provider but doesn’t receive anything back from the secondary nameservers, they won’t even try again on another name server as there might not be any others left running.
This creates downtime, which is detrimental to your server and website. For this reason, creating a Google DNS failover is necessary.
What are the Steps for Creating a DNS Failover?
If you’re interested in creating a DNS failover for your website in case there is a “DNS multiple IP addresses fail” error, the good news is that they’re a few steps to follow.
These steps are:
Step #1: Find the DNS Records for Your Domain
The first thing you need to do is find where your domain’s DNS records are currently set up and make sure they point to the primary server or IP address.
This should be simple to find, as the DNS records for your domain are clearly visible in your hosting provider’s hosting provider.
Step #2: Add an A Record to Point to the Secondary Name Server
The next step is creating an A record for your domain that points at the secondary name server.
This will be needed if you want failover and automatic switching between servers, so don’t skip this step.
Step #3: Add a Contact Listing
This is a very important step, as it will be needed for the failover service to contact you if there’s an outage.
The best way would be to add your email address or phone number in case something goes wrong with either of them.
Step #4: Configure Failover
You can’t do anything about a DNS failover until you set up the secondary name server and point it to your domain.
This is when you’ll be able to see the failover switch in action, with everything set up.
Need Help Setting Up a DNS Failover?
Creating a DNS failover is an excellent failsafe to protect your server. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, read on here.
