DNS Failover is a cloud-based service that leverages remote monitoring coupled with Anycast DNS services. It’s designed to add uptime and prevent outages by failing over a hostname to a backup IP or CNAME.

Failover is powered by two separate services: Server or application monitoring and a DNS platform. The DNS must have a low TTL that can handle automatic DNS Failover based on the intelligent monitoring decisions.

Failover is accomplished by multiple monitoring points using different networks in various geographical locations. The monitoring must have intelligent decision-making to prevent false positives or failover could happen when it isn’t needed.

Failover is initiated when the monitoring “brain” determines that more than one of the monitoring agents can’t reach the IP or hostname being monitored. This kicks off the failover rules and DNS will automatically change the CNAME or IP address to the backup address.

The DNS service within DNS failover should be a fast & reliable that offers a very low TTL (also known as DNS cache time). The TTL should be set at half of the time of the test interval. For example, if we are testing a web server every 1 minute, the DNS for the www.example.com record should be set to a 30-second TTL. This allows recursive servers around the globe to ensure a fresh lookup on the www record every 30 seconds.

When the monitoring endpoints detect a “down” host, our Netmon monitoring platform collects all location reports and if more than 3 are down we action the ruleset for that failover test. In this HTTP web server example, we will move the DNS record for www.example.com to the backup IP Address set in the rules.

How DNS Failover works – step by step

1. Setup your DNS on a provider that offers DNS Failover – Move DNS to CloudFloorDNS Anycast DNS platform that offers a low TTL option for DNS failover. If you stay at a provider such as GoDaddy, or another basic DNS provider, you would only be able to use CNAME Failover options and CNAME your DNS to CloudFloorDNS
2. Determine what needs to be monitored – ie. What pain point do you want to solve? Is the issue with your ISP going down, or a server going down? This determines what you want to monitor and what protocol to use
3. Determine what service you want to failover – If it’s a Web server, you would want to failover the www subdomain and possible the root domain and what IP address or CNAME is for the backup
4. Begin Monitoring target – Start monitoring from 3 or more locations globally and ensure all monitors are actively monitoring and determine the target is UP
5. Setup Notifications – Set Notification up to send emails to your team. Setup DNS Failover rules when the monitor fails. This ruleset tells the DNS what hostname and what backup CNAME / IP to move to on failure. You can select just one hostname or multiple hostnames/backup IP’s
6. Failover or Fail-Back? Determine if your failover should Failover and Fail-back when the primary comes up, or Failover-StayOver where it will failover but you will have to manually fail-back
7. Set it and forget it – DNS Failover will notify you when your target fails and will instantly failover your selected hosts to backup IP/CNAME. If you have Fail-Back set – it’ll notify you and failback to the primary IP/CNAME

Can DNS Failover help your online business?

Most likely it can! Below are few use case scenarios to help you determine if DNS failover can help your servers & applications run faster, stay up and provide more uptime for your online business. If you are still running your online business on a DNS without any uptime SLA, it’s highly suggested you move immediately to a reputable DNS provider that offers a 100% uptime SLA

ISP Failover for Two Internet Connections

In the example of ISP Failover, you can apply the same monitoring platform, but you should set ICMP/PING as the protocol and ping the gateway of the primary ISP every 1 minute. When the primary ISP goes down, CloudFloorDNS will activate the failover ruleset and instantly move all your selected subdomains for your on-premise servers & apps to the backup ISP. There is no difference in price if you move one subdomain or multiple. You can move VPN, WWW, FTP, OWA for example – all with one failover test, or just WWW

GSLB Failover with GEO Load Balancing

Many global organizations with multiple locations have many different VPN nodes for their employees to get on network. For example, there could be three in the US, one in the UK, and two more in EU and APAC respectively. To make it easy, the company provides a single domain VPN.EXAMPLE.COM to their employees – CloudFloorDNS can geographically load balance and failover the 3 locations should one go down or become unavailable. Using GEO DNS, CloudFloorDNS can detect end-user location, and provide the DNS answer to the closest VPN in their region. Offering this type of service provides greater uptime, drastically lowers latency and will make their connection faster. When they travel, it’ll send them to the nearest VPN geographically. If one or multiple VPN nodes go down, DNS failover can remove the failed node(s) from the VPN load balancing group and add them back in when they come back up

VOIP Failover for VOIP

VOIP Failover can do all the above, although it’s specifically designed to monitor the SIP OPTIONS protocol. It adds a high availability option for disaster recovery by having a second backup VOIP server in another geographic location. The servers can be load balanced or the primary can be monitored and upon failure, move the SIP.Example.com hostname to the backup SIP server

About the CloudFloorDNS Netmon Monitoring Platform

The CloudFloorDNS Netmon Monitoring platform has 7 global locations with over 20 methods to select when setting up your failover test. If you are monitoring a web server, you would select http/https protocol. When monitoring an ISP connection, you would use ICMP/PING protocol. Other methods include TCP/UDP, SIP, FTP, SSH and others

DNS Failover is an easy way to add more uptime to any of your online services, and best of all it’s low cost coming around $50 per month and that includes Anycast DNS.

Learn more about our CloudFloorDNS DNS Failover solutions or contact us to get a quote

As any online business matures and grows, so grows their domain name portfolio. As online replaces brick & mortar, Domains (and DNS) are ever more important parts of your IP (Intellectual Property) and act as the true foundation of your online business. Your online brand, DNS & domain name are so closely tied together that any downtime, outages, expirations of your Domain, DNS or SSL will wreak havoc on your online infrastructure. This is really bad for business not to mention the extraordinary amount of lost revenue and intangible brand damage.

Modern businesses now tend to own more domain names than ever before due to mergers/acquisitions, marketing programs and brand & phishing protection. The more domains an organization has, the better the likelihood that these domains are spread out over many different registrars. Some at GoDaddy, some at Reg123, some at Network Solutions and maybe a few at WildWest. The list goes on and having more than a few domains a different registrars can cause you to accidentally lose domains due to missed expirations or failure to keep your contact details updated across your portfolio.

Owning domains that could be mistaken for your brand name is a key defense strategy against phishing and other attacks. These attacks tend to use a look-alike website with a domain that is mistaken for your brand. It’s better that you own them than the crooks!

Domain consolidation makes sense as having your portfolio of domains located in a singular registration coupled with an enterprise anycast DNS. The CloudFloorDNS platform allows you access to a powerful domain portfolio management platform coupled with a fast, reliable business geared DNS with a 100% uptime SLA

Here are just a few of the additional benefits to consolidation of your domain portfolio on the CloudFloorDNS platform:

• Bulk Domain & DNS Edits: Bulk edits are critical if you have more than a handful of domains. ICANN rules force you to keep contacts updated and having bulk tools make these changes take 5 seconds instead of 5 days
• DNS & Domain API: Leveraging our API you can renew, register, transfer, bulk acquire domains, as well as perform all DNS functions
• Multi-User access & Notifications: With multi-user access you’ll be able to assign permissions to other users or groups within your organization for both DNS and Domain functions. You can also have multiple emails on expirations and other domain alert notifications to ensure multiple eyes see the notice
• Discounts for Larger Portfolios: The larger the portfolio the deeper the discount. Bulk transfers and our transfer concierge service make it easy to move
• DNS & Domain Experts on Hand: Our support is top notch and all of our representatives are well versed in DNS & Domain operations
• Access to Stats & Advanced DNS Features: Moving your domains to a true managed DNS provider like CloudFloorDNS means access to statistics as well as advanced features such as GEO DNS, DNS Failover, VOIP & SIP Failover, Load Balancing and much more
• Invoicing for Larger Domain Portfolios: Ditch the many credit card renewal transactions at multiple providers. Consolidation of your domain portfolio can save time in finance and administration of domain fees. Tally up your yearly portfolio spend and we can invoice your domain costs in one annual bill

Learn more about our CloudFloorDNS DNS & Domain services or contact us to get a quote on consolidating your domain portfolio

Massive DNS issues wreak havoc with Register.com and Network Solutions customers

ISP Failover

For most small to medium businesses, there are almost always some on-prem (on premise, or in-building) services hosted at “HQ” or at some satellite offices. Many of these services are commonly used for remote employees or external customers and both need to be up and running to run the business. In many cases these on-prem hosted services are VPN, OWA (Outlook Web Access), WWW, FTP, ADFS, Databases, sales tools etc.

The biggest issue with hosting these above on-prem services using a single ISP is downtime. Downtime is expensive – and just a single VPN outage can knock your remote employees offline and put a stop to your business. Hosting your Website on-prem too? Well, you are now losing sales and both your remote employees and customers are all calling your helpdesk and in-house IT to figure out what’s going on. It’s a downward spiral from here and can cost much more than money. Don’t forget about the intangible effects from angry customers, damage to your brand and reputation and so much more. So yeah, we can say that downtime is expensive in more ways than one!

Using only a single ISP to host your on-prem services is like playing the lottery – it may never go down for an extended period, or Murphy’s law would have a car hit a telephone pole up the street and snap it in half. This causes your ISP to be knocked out for 12+ hours during the business season of the year. An ice storm can knock out power for even longer, 10 days or more is possible, just ask New Englanders or more recently, some Texans.

As you can see from the above scenario’s, downtime is the main reason many small to medium businesses add a second ISP into the building. Having dual ISP’s and the appropriate dual WAN hardware (Sonicwall, Cisco, Fortinet and others) will automatically fail over ISP1 to ISP2 in the event of a failure on the primary ISP connection.

Oh No Mr Roboto

One big problem with this scenario is your DNS for these domains and services do not failover – only your hardware switches over automatically. Unless you have DNS Failover, your DNS stays at the old IP address until your DNS administrator or IT guy makes the changes. If this happens in the middle of the night or on a weekend, or worse vacation time with the family, it could take quite a while to get this changed over.

The second big issue with this is the DNS provider that’s hosting the domain these services are attached to. Most registrar or “vanilla DNS” providers do not offer low cache times or what’s known as TTL or Time to Live. Every DNS record has this setting, and if you have an IP address that never goes down and never needs to move, this can be set high, even 14400 or higher.

The need to be fast & nimble

Let’s say your provider doesn’t let you set a TTL below 30 minutes or 1800 seconds. Now now matter how fast you make the update, it could take someone 30 more minutes to get the new IP address since DNS servers “cache” or remember these records from the previous IP.

Managed DNS providers like CloudFloorDNS and others offer a very low TTL setting, typically 30 seconds. By setting your VPN.Example.com record to 30 seconds, this means that a DNS server won’t cache this for longer than 30 seconds before it comes back to us to request the IP address again. So combining this low TTL with Monitoring from multiple locations (Our Netmon Monitoring platform) and DNS Failover and you have the missing piece of the puzzle to flip over your hostnames for you automatically! When your Primary ISP comes back up, you can even have the DNS Failover move everything back and notify you.

Our ISP Failover service allows you to monitor an IP or hostname and we would PING your gateway of your Primary ISP every 1 minute from several locations, a minimum of 3 geographically distributed locations on different networks to send these PINGS. Each monitor location reports back to the master and when 2 or more go down, we’ll initiate the failover rules that YOU set. Each failover “test” can attach itself to 1 DNS zone, so let’s say Example.com is hosted on our DNS and you want to enable Failover for that domain

You host VPN, WWW, and OWA on-prem on example.com and need to failover to the backup ISP IP range when ISP1 goes down. You setup the failover test and it provides access to the zonefile to select what hostnames you want to move on this failover exactly like the example below. There is no additional cost as long as the CNAME or A-Record lives within example.com that the test “attaches” to.

VPN.example.com primary is 1.1.1.1 and upon failure move to 2.2.2.1
WWW.example.com primary is 1.1.1.2 and failover to the IP of 2.2.2.2
OWA.example.com primary is 1.1.1.3 and failover to the IP of 2.2.2.3

See how easy it is? It’s a combination of the right DNS provider, monitoring and DNS failover technology that can help your on-prem services stay up and active for your employees and customers. At only $50 a month for our Bronze Anycast DNS plan (includes Failover) it’s a very small price to pay for the uptime insurance that it provides!

Interested? Learn more about our DNS Failover and BRONZE Anycast DNS plan that comes with DNS Failover / ISP Failover