Redirect to www2 or an IP address

redirect ip address

[dealcatcher]

During the holidays our website has gotten too busy to host off our in-house T1. We are currently mirroring just or main page on a another offsite server. My question is, is it better to use a 302 redirect to www2.mysite.com or to the ip address of the server. Is there any type of penalty in Google for doing this? Right now this is a temporary solution, we have more bandwidth on the way however it could be a few weeks.

[tedster]

Either situation has the potential downside of seeing duplicate content indexed. By using a 302 redirect to a subdomain, I think the potential for trouble is minimized - but not eliminated. I would never suggest using the IP address.

I think a more sound approach is urgent for you. This feels like a kludge that is fraught with potential troubles. You might want to research "load balancing", both here and in general. I'm out of my depth on the topic, but you are talking about the kind of issues that load balancing faces and resolves.

[jtara]

A 302 shouldn't result in a penalty.

Better would be to put a proxy in front of the load-balanced sites.

Might want to check on Amazon EC2 support forums. This is one of the uses for EC2. (Offloading peak loads.)

[dealcatcher]

I realized that RSS was using a lot of bandwidth, so I moved our feed to rss.mysite.com/rss.xml. Hopefully, it will be enough to reduce or bandwidth usage.