CloudfloorDNS Blog
9-10-2018 – CNAME Failover – DNS Failover for Disaster Prevention & Remediation
By: Eric McIntyre, Sr. Director of DNS Business Development at CloudfloorDNS
CNAME Failover – instant Disaster prevention using Server Monitoring & DNS
CNAME Failover let’s you utilize the benefits of DNS Failover without having to move your DNS to a new managed DNS provider. This let’s you get DNS failover and use it with any DNS provider such as GoDaddy, Verisign, Network Solutions, Ghandi, 1&1 and others. Setup is a breeze and all you need to do is simply change one A-Record in your current DNS and CNAME that to a domain name CloudFloorDNS provides for you. That’s it!
CNAME Failover can be setup quickly and easily and best of all it’s low cost. Once you have your CNAME selected (yournamehere.cfdnsfo.com) you can then setup the monitoring component that tests your server or web application. In most cases it’s a web server, but you can also use CNAME failover with other services and domains if your primary ISP goes down. A good example would be Failing over several hostnames when your primary ISP goes down. We setup a Netmon monitoring agent to test your primary ISP gateway or firewall to determine it’s up. Once we determine the Primary ISP has failed and is no longer responding, we update your CNAME to the backup IP you provide in the Failover. Our low TTL times allow the DNS record to propagate quickly and since your name is CNAMED to ours, you don’t have to change a thing at your current DNS provider
In order to use Failover you must use a monitoring component. Our Patented DNS and Failover platform offers you a way to set up a monitoring test and also provides you with the ability to test the service/server/app every minute from up to seven global locations. False positives (False Alarms) are a thing of the past, we require 3 or more test locations to fail before we kickoff the failover DNS change to the backup. We then notify you that we’ve detected a failure while we are changing the DNS. If you’d like you can enable Fail-Back we can even switch the DNS back to the primary when it comes back up.
Want to learn more about our CNAME Failover service? Watch a video on how CNAME Failover works or reach out and contact one of our DNS Experts for demo and proof of concept.
