Redundant servers at different locations

Is it possible

[ggrot]

I have a site that is handling a large quantity of traffic. Probably about 30-40 pageviews a second kind of thing. Some people are paying fees to use this site, and while we have no guarantee regarding uptime, downtime is still a very bad thing.

What I'd like to do is mirror the site on two different dedicated servers with two different companies (different NOC's, different geographic locations). Then I would like it if the primary server went down, that the secondary server would automatically pick up the traffic seamlessly. Is this, or anything like it, possible to accomplish?

[stlouislouis]

Hi,

Maybe I shouldn't even post, since I'm a newbie to this sort of thing.

But if I recall correctly, I read a hosting discussion thread where someone
mentioned using DNS entries for this. Something about having several nameservers
so that if one was unavailable the next one down on the list would resolve
to the desired IP address. Maybe someone with more knowledge of DNS
could elaborate or dismiss this as a possible solution for you.

I hope the above is helpful.

Take care and best wishes,

Louis

[BlobFisk]

The is a primary and secondary DNS setting. The Primary DNS points to your current server and files, the second points to a server (that should be) geographically situated somewhere else!

I am not 100% sure as to the upkeep of files on each server... but I have seen one domain name pointing to many IP addresses. Sometimes this is handled by a load balancer that redirects http requests to different servers, so that no one gets overburdened.

The Primary and Secondary DNS entries should be registered with your ISP, if memory serves me...!