One of my clients hosts his own web server with a primary and a failover internet connection:
Lets say our primary IP is 1.1.1.1 and our backup is 2.2.2.2. GoDaddy hosts our name servers so anytime someone wants to go to
www.ourdomain.com a DNS host also known as an A record is setup pointing to 1.1.1.1. This works well enough and people land on our website. However if our internet goes down the IP currently changes to 2.2.2.2 which will break the A record setup on GoDaddy and
www.ourdomain.com will not resolve. The quick fix is to modify the A record on Godaddy to the failover IP. This will get the site back up and running in just a few minutes. This is the short term solution.
Given that DNS does not support IP failover here is the solution I propose. Assign the site the IP 3.3.3.3. This site is a service that monitors 1.1.1.1 and 2.2.2.2. By default it will forward all traffic to 1.1.1.1 however if the site goes down it will automatically failover to 2.2.2.2.
What solutions do you suggest for this type of issue? Currently they are happy hosting on site they just need a way for the IP to failover