Dns Question

[vendlus]

When setting up the domain name, I know you put where the dns should point to (such as TCH's addresses NS1.TOTALCHOICEHOSTING.COM and NS2.TOTALCHOICEHOSTING.COM). What happens if you add in a third or fourth address there (say from another host)??

 

Does it go down the list in order, going to the first one it can?? Or does it randomly pick one off of your list to go to??

 

Here's why I ask. If my main site goes down because my host has a fluke, I want people to still be able to see the static pages, or at the least, an error page telling them what's going on. Ideally, I'd like the dns to always go to the address listed first (the main host), and only go to the last address (a different host) if the first one's fail. Any ideas on how the whole process works??

 

Btw, this isn't a big issue for me, but I webmaster a site on another host who is having some issues at the moment, and until we can get switched (probably to here... my experience so far with my account here is great), I'd like a way to inform people when there are outages besides having to email my entire mailing list (which is not an option).

 

Thanks,

- Vendlus

 

- ps. I think this is the correct forum for this question, but if not, please move it. I'd hate to break the rules with my first post.

[TCH-Rick]

Adding additional nameservers pointing to a different IP will cause more harm than good. It would work okay theoretically if you had the exact same content on the two sites but email would be a mess. I just dealt with a Help Desk ticket where someone added the two nameservers given in the Welcome Email to the two existing nameservers. He complained that he only saw his site 30% of the time. If you have an outage message on one site then you are going to have people see that even when the site is up and working fine.

 

Ultimately you put your trust in your host to keep your site up and running. We take that trust very seriously and if you look at some of the posts on the forum you can see that when problems occur we keep folks informed and bust our tails to fix the problem. Check the post times on some of Head Guru's posts in the Server Issues thread.

[vendlus]

Ok, so the dns accesses a random address from your list each time then. Which means, as you said, that all the sites would have to be exactly the same. I figured that's probably how it worked, just thought I'd ask to satisfy my curiousity. Once we get some account details settled, I'll probably have the site I oversee switched over to TCH since I've heard wonderful things from several different sources and have had a great personal experience here so far. Then it shouldn't even be something that'll cross my mind again.

 

Thanks for your quick reply,

- Vendlus