I have looked into some vendors that handle round-robin and failover services, and I see some problems with their setups and/or pricing models. Would the following be a sound method:

I have a Linode VPS and a VPSone (micro-)VPS, both under Ubuntu 10.10, with Webmin control panels, and with the www pages all rsync'd.

Currently, Network Solutions is the registrar of my domain, and is the place where I manage my DNS Records. I use Google Apps for my MX and SRV Records. I have NetSol Nameservers in use. I have my A records pointed to my Linode VPS. If Linode looks like it will be down for more than half a day I could manually point my A records to VPSone.

Can I simply do the following:

I would use Webmin on both VPSs to set up my DNS records. (I have not done this previously.) The MX and SRV records would be the same, but the A records would be different, A records on Linode pointed to my Linode VPS, and A records on VPSone pointed to my VPSone VPS.

On NetSol I would list say 4 Nameservers, 2 for Linode and 2 for VPSone. I would have the Linode Nameservers first, which I assume would mean that most of the time most queries would go to Linode, my primary VPS.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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http://www.ingber.com

I'm not an expert on DNS, but I'm pretty certain that just because you list your linode name servers first that doesn't mean that they will get the majority of the traffic. And what if the webserver on Linode dies? How does the system know to switch over to the VPSone server?

Except where otherwise specified (e.g. with weights on MX and SRV records), DNS records are unordered. So, the traffic would be evenly split between the two.

Your best bet would be to use a third-party DNS provider, then adjust the A record when required. Some (such as dnsmadeeasy.com) also offer a monitoring service that will change the record for you.

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