Names Servers Order and a Hosted Name Server

Question

I have 2 VPS Servers they are both from different providers.

The idea was to have the second one as a backup server if the first one goes down.

I have setup the nameservers like this

ns0.THEIPSTAGHOLDER.com /points to my first VPS
ns1.THEIPSTAGHOLDER.com ""
ns0.BACKUPVPS.com running DNS Software
ns1.BACKUPVPS.com running DNS Software

a moment ago, my first VPS went down but it did not switch over to my backup VPS

Is this because the 1st and second choice nameservers were found as they are the Tag Holders DNS?

Should I change my nameservers to my first VPS and run DNS on there nstead of using the Tag Holders?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

DNS tends to be a bad way to do fail-over. DNS will cache records at client DNS servers. You can configured the TTL of your DNS records to be fairly short, but then your DNS server will receive more traffic, as you are purposely shortening the caching time to live. There is also no guarantees that individual providers will pay attention to your TTL records.

A Load balancer is probably the way to go from redundancy, but I've never deployed one in a hosted environment. Amazon provides the Elastic Load Balencer as part of their web service, but it doesn't appear to support services outside of their network. http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/

Answer 2

set DNS1 in your server1 and point to server1 set DNS2 in your server2 and point to server2 set DNS expire time to 30s or less

Once server1 (DNS1) is down, the trafic will go to server2 (DNS2) The downtime is less than DNS expire time