Hi, I want to get a second server and incase one of them goes down, it will automatically point to the other one so that my sites will have higher uptime. Does anyone know how to achieve this? I thought it would work by setting up the nameserver of the domain such as this: nameserver 1: ns1.nameserver1.com -> points to server 1 nameserver 2: ns2. nameserver2.com -> points to server 2 However, they said this will only work for static content since the domain arbitrarily choose one nameserver over the other. So, for dynamic content, it would mess things up. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Would a Cloud server now be cheaper than 2 servers and do what you want. You might get better help posting in "Site & Server Administration" by the way.
You'd be better off finding a host who provides high-availability or load-balanced hosting who will be used to setting up this type of hosting arrangement. What you want to do is relatively easy with virtualization although without clustered SAN's you still have a single point of failure. If it must be dedicated servers then there are ways to do it. I don't know anything about Linux as I work for a Windows hosting company. We do it regularly for IIS clusters and MS SQL clusters but is isn't a cheap option and requires a bit of management and set-up, but automatic failover is possible. You're DNS option isn't really failover, and as you have been told the DNS record a visitor gets can be random plus that information will be cached for a period so there will always be a delay in the switchover for some regular visitors. It's also true what you were told about dynamic sites, and with the DNS option you will still need to have a centralized database that each dedicated server will use - with that centralized database still being a single point of failure. Your best bet is a host who does this sort of thing regularly, and they are unlikely to be cheap.
its better off to get a cloud setup. Citrix xen and vmware vsphere cloud have High availability concept in which you can can get 100% redundancy for hardware failure. Also in future scaling up and down would never be a problem for you. You would just need to keep one server in standby which saves you on hardware cost when you go 2+ servers.