How To Create A Server Failover Solution - Expert How-To Guides

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How to create a server failover
solution
 Posted on May 16, 2013 by Shane Helpton Posted in Web Servers — 91 Comments ↓
An automatic server failover solution can prevent your website from going down in the event of a
server failure. Through automatic detection, an error on your primary server can be detected and
traffic will automatically be sent to a backup server.
Overview
An automatic server failover solution is surprisingly easy to setup. It works by having two servers with
identical content on them – a primary server and a secondary server. A third server monitors the
primary server and detects if there is a problem. If there is, it will automatically update the DNS
records for your website so that traffic will be diverted to your secondary server. Once your primary
server is functioning again, traffic will be routed back to your primary server. Most of the time your
users won’t even notice a thing!
Setting up an automatic server failover solution just consists of 5 steps:
1. Get a secondary server
2. Synchronize primary and secondary servers
3. Reveal server status
4. Set up DNS Failover
5. Test it!
Step 1: Get a secondary server
The first thing you need is another server to be your secondary/failover server. This doesn’t need to
be a dedicated server – if you’re using shared hosting then another shared hosting account will do
just fine. However it is important that you choose a server that is physically different from your
primary server. I recommend not only using a different hosting company, but also making sure that
the servers are in different locations.
What good does a secondary server do if its using the same network as your primary server when it
goes down? Or if a server admin makes a goof that’s propagated to all servers they manage? Before
I sign up with any new host I’ll research where they’re located to make sure it’s not in the same state
as my primary server. You can use the IP Information tool here to check the location of any ip
address
If you don’t know where to find a good secondary server host, let me suggest StableHost. I recently
moved over to them after too many problems with HostGator, and I’ve been really impressed. They
are the best bang for your buck – great plans with realistic prices (as of now, shared starting at
$5/month). Plus they just migrated all their servers to a Provo, Utah location, which I doubt is the
location of your primary server. Oh, and here’s a StableHost coupon code for 40% off: expert40
Step 2: Synchronize primary and
secondary servers
Right now you have a blank backup server, but sending people there in the event of an emergency
will do no good unless it mirrors your primary site. You could copy everything over right now, but then
you’d have to manually update the secondary server every time you change the primary server,
which is a hassle. What we need next is a way to automatically keep your primary and secondary
servers in sync with each other.
Syncing website files
There are two common approaches I typically use to keep my website files in sync: Rsync and
Source Code Repositories.
Rsync is a unix utility that synchronizes files and directories from one location to another. You run a
simple command similar to “rsync server1:/myfiles server2:mybackupfiles” and it will copy everything
inside ‘myfiles’ from server1 into the ‘mybackupfiles’ folder on server2. It also saves time and
bandwidth by only copying over what is different, pretty cool!
You’ll run a command similar to this on your secondary server. Be sure to use the IP address of your
primary server instead of the host name since the host name could refer to the secondary server
when failover has kicked in (that’ll make sense later). I’d suggest mirroring everything in the public
html directory.
rsync -avz primaryuser@1.2.3.4:/home/mywebsite/public_html

/home/secondarywebsite/public_html
In order for this to work, you need to set up ssh keys so that the secondary server is allowed to
access the primary server (security!). This tutorial can help you set that up: Setting up ssh keys for
rsync. It looks daunting, but really isn’t that bad. In that article, ‘thishost’ is the secondary server, and
‘remotehost’ is the primary. You can skip the ‘validatersync’ part if you wish.
If you can run that rsync command successfully via command line, it’s time to automate it so that it
runs without you having to run it. I configured mine to run every night at midnight, but you can choose
to make yours run more or less often, depending on how often your server files change. We’ll be
automating this with a cronjob. Type ‘crontab e’, and then add this line, where ‘rsync…’ is your rsync
line:
0 0 * * * rsyc...
An alternative method is to use a source code management system and pull from it regularly. For
example, if you have a git repository set up that contains all of your website files, simply running a ‘git
pull’ instead of that rsync command will accomplish the same by pulling the latest files from the repo.
Here’s a tutorial for Setting up git on a server.
Syncing databases
If your website replies upon a database, such as wordpress does, then you’ll also need to copy over
the database, which is separate from the file copy you’ve just set up. Technically you could try to just
copy over the database files, but I wouldn’t recommend that – it could create inconsistent data in the
event of an error. I’ll show you how to copy over the contents directly from within your database
program.
We’ll use MySQL for this example, but all database systems should have similar commands. You’ll
first need to have a blank database set up on the secondary server with the same name, user, and
password as the primary server’s database. Then we’ll utilize the mysqldump utility to spit out the
contents of the primary server’s database and feed it directly to the copy. This command should be
run from the secondary server:
mysqldump --host=1.2.3.4 --user=MYDBUSER -pMYDBPASSWORD --add-drop-

table --no-create-db --skip-lock-tables MYDBNAME | mysql --
user=MYDBUSER -pMYDBPASSWORD MYDBNAME
Be sure to replace the values above with your actual primary server ip address and user/passwords.
Once you’ve verified that this command works, simply run it as a cronjob as we have done with rsync
or git. Run ‘crontab e’, then add your mysqldump command:
0 0 * * * mysqldump...
Now your database will be mirrored onto your secondary server every night! This solution works well
for websites that don’t absolutely need their secondary server to have an exact uptodate copy of
their primary data. Understand that if you add a new wordpress article during the day and then your
server fails over to the secondary, the secondary won’t have that new article in its database until the
database sync is run again at night. If you need a realtime copy of your data, you can look into
setting up a mastermaster replication solution, or come up with a manual method of copying over a
subset of the data as it is changed given you know how your website works.
Most web applications depend on your website files and database to run smoothly, which we have
taken care of. If your server depends on other functions, such as mail, you’ll have to come up with a
plan to keep those systems in sync as well. Unfortunately that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
Step 3: Reveal server status
The tool we’re going to use to automatically switch your servers upon failure needs to know when
your server is failing. It does this by checking your server every few minutes for a specific response.
You can have it check just your homepage to see if its serving content, but I like to get a little more
detailed. For example, your website may still return a page if your database is down, which would be
a false indicator that everything’s okay when it’s not.
I recommend creating a server status page that reveals if ALL services are functioning properly.
Make a simple script that connects to the database and returns ‘SUCCESS’ only if the connection
was successful. This ensures that HTTP and database services must be functioning properly to
report a successful server status. If there are other services your site depends on, include a check for
those too. Here’s a sample PHP script I use to report that my server is healthy:
//connect
$link = mysqli_connect("localhost", "my_user", "my_password",
"my_db");
// check connection
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
printf("Connect failed: %s\n", mysqli_connect_error());
exit();
}
//perform simple query

if ($result = mysqli_query($link, "SELECT 1")) {
if(mysqli_num_rows($result)) echo "SUCCESS";
mysqli_free_result($result);
}
//close
mysqli_close($link);
After that file is set up, you should be able to go to that page in your browser and see SUCCESS!
Step 4: Set up DNS Failover
We’ll be using a service called DNS Made Easy to provide DNS Failover. This automatically checks
your server status script every few minutes for ‘SUCCESS’. In the event your server is unreachable,
or there’s some other error and it doesn’t see ‘SUCCESS’, DNS Made Easy will change your DNS
entries to point to your backup server. As soon as your primary server is reachable again DNS Made
Easy will revert the changes back to your primary server . Since your visitors are accessing your site
via your domain name, no one will ever know what just happened as they’ll have been pointed to a
functioning server the whole time!
You’ll need to purchase a DNS Made Easy account and then point your DNS their name servers so
they are handling your domain name. Their Business level account ($60/year) includes up to 3
hostnames to monitor (you’ll need 2: one for http://www.yourwebsite.com, and one for
http://yourwebsite.com). Note that this price is per year, not per month – pretty cheap considering the
peace of mind it provides!
After you create your account and set up your basic name server settings, you’ll need to configure
the automatic failover. In the Arecords table of hosts, click the Off in the SM/FO column and input
your values:
Use these settings:
Sensitivity: High so that your server will be checked more often and routed quicker in the
event of an outage.
File To Query: this is the path to your server status script that should return ‘SUCCESS’. Use
a relative path (‘/check/status.php’) that doesn’t include your domain or IP address.
String To Query For: SUCCESS. Or if you used a different message in your server status
script.
IP Address 1: This is the IP of your primary server
IP Address 2: This is the IP of your secondary server
Monitoring Notifications and DNS Failover: make sure these are checked
Click OK to save – it should now read ‘On’ in the SM/FO column next to that host. Then do the same
for the hostname with no name next to it (the blank one is for people that access your site without the
www in front).
One last thing you’ll need to do is set the TTL to 300 seconds. TTL is the Time To Live, and it means
how long DNS entries should be cached for. The lower the value the quicker DNS will be updated for
those that have already been to your site. It can be set as low as 60 seconds, but 300 is more likely
to be honored by big ISPs who would otherwise use a much larger default value – plus it lowers our
queries per month. Set this with the Edit icon while your Arecord is checked in the table.
Step 5: Test it!
Make sure you wait at least 2 days before testing this – it will take 2428 hours for your initial DNS
transfer to DNS Made Easy to propagate through the internet. To test, simply rename the server
status script so that the monitoring cannot find it. Within 24 minutes, you’ll receive an email alerting
you that your site is down (you’ll actually receive 2, one for each host). Once this happens, ping your
website – it’ll show you the IP address mapped to your domain name.
You should see your secondary server’s IP address. If you don’t, it’s because you recently visited
your site and the entry was cached. You’ll just have to wait a maximum of 300 seconds (that TTL
setting) for it to expire and your computer to make a new lookup. If your ping result doesn’t show a
different IP address within 5 minutes, check over all the steps to make sure it’s been set up properly
Tips
In DNS Made Easy‘s settings, you’ll notice that there are 5 IP addresses listed. This allows
you to string up to 4 backup servers! It will keep checking down the chain of servers until it
finds one that works, just in case your first secondary server isn’t working either.
If your primary server is down for a long time, you might want to disable your automatic
server syncing so that your active secondary server doesn’t get interrupted while handling
live traffic
You can utilize this approach to help with major server maintenance. Simply fake an outage
by renaming the server status script. Traffic will be diverted to your secondary server and you
can perform major updates on your primary server. When you’re done, revert the server
status!
Summary
You’ve successfully created an alternative server, synchronized it to be an exact copy of your primary,
and set up failover so in the event of a disaster it will automatically kick in to serve your traffic. Next
time your primary server fails you won’t have to do a thing – and you didn’t have to install any failover
software! You can rest assured knowing your visitors are able to access your website at all times.
Congratulations!
Resources Used
IP Information tool
StableHost
DNS Made Easy
How to get HTTPS: Setting up SSL on your website ›
91 comments on “How to create a server failover solution”
chris says:
June 12, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Thank you.
Reply
chris says:
June 12, 2013 at 12:23 pm
What about the email servers? When the the website is switched to the new host ip the email will
be rooted to the new host…right?What to do in order to have an email backup also?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
June 13, 2013 at 7:06 am
Great question, Chris! The first step of sending email is looking up the MX records (mail
exchange) at the DNS level. If it points to your main domain name’s A record, then everything
will follow the backup plan described above. If it has a different A record, such as
mail.yourdomain.com, then you can decide what you want to do with that record – leave it as
is and let the mail be returned when it’s down, or set up failover for that subdomain too.
Here’s some more info about MX records:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/products/resources/blog/160spotlightarticles/163sowhatdodns
andemailhavetodowitheachother
Hope that helps!
Reply
wilson says:
December 3, 2013 at 2:42 pm
amazing your help, thanks so much i really save lot of time with your steps.
One question, do you know some free services like dns made easy?, just for test purposes.
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Wilson. Unfortunately DNSMadeEasy is the only provider that I can personally
recommend. Good news is they do offer a 30 day free trial without payment required. Good
luck!
Reply
Forresthopkinsa says:
September 17, 2014 at 9:22 pm
Cloudflare seems to provide this for free. Have you found out anything more over the past
year?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
September 25, 2014 at 6:08 am
Cloudflare provides a service just for images, not your entire site/code.
Reply
Benson Trent says:
Thanks for the guide. Very helpful. I was stumped at the Key/Pair Setup, but this simpler guide
from Pai H. Chou helped me out: http://www.ece.uci.edu/~chou/sshkey.html ; then I added the
security recommendations from the guide you recommended.
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
December 7, 2013 at 6:54 am
Hi Benson – Thanks for the feedback and for posting that link, I’m sure it will help others too!
Reply
someguy says:
if your datacenter fails the second after your script gets its latest SUCCESS flag and heads out for
a 1 minute smoke break before checking again, that’s enough time to flatline the entire farm. it’s
also enough to affect your guaranteed uptime averages, depending on the size of your network.
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
You are correct – this is not going to guarantee 99.999% uptime, but should be enough to
keep you online within minutes of your primary host failing. Earlier this month I had a server
go down (with Hostgator, ugh) and it took 2 days to get back up. Luckily with this solution we
were only down a few minutes.
Reply
Rishin says:
June 24, 2018 at 6:55 pm
Few minutes ??
How about DNS propagation time..?
By the time it propagated update the primary server would be up and running?
Reply
BaxVai says:
January 1, 2014 at 8:56 pm
If primary server is down and switch to the secondary one, what i want to do is when the primary
is up again, can it go back from the secondary to the primary? thanks a bunch…
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
January 2, 2014 at 6:54 am
Yes! DnsMadeEasy will keep checking the primary to see if it’s up, and if so will automatically
switch everything back to normal once that happens. If you wish, they also have a setting to
stay on backup once the switch has been made.
Reply
Sanjay Kumar says:
January 20, 2014 at 12:08 pm
When Primary is down it will point to Secondary. But when primary is up it will switch to
primary again. Its fine, But in case of database Secondary server has the latest
database. What about the database sync from secondary to primary.
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Great question – You can either set up mastermaster replication, or write a script
to copy the data back over once the primary is back up.
Reply
Adam Boustead says:
Hi Shane,
Do you happen to have a tutorial on how to write a script to copy the data back
once the primary is back up?
Martin says:
March 8, 2016 at 12:43 pm
Hi Shane,
Very wellwritten, easytounderstand tutorial. Thank you.
I am wondering if you can suggest a link (or two) about how to setup the Master
Master replication. I’m currently running mysql (and web service) on CentOS
server. I’d like to replicate the server and database, and use your dns solution in
case of failure. But I’d like the primary (once backup) to have the latest copy of
database.
Thanks again.
Martin
Reply
Tommy says:
So I’m looking into using the server failover solution you’ve described but have one question. My
primary server is dedicated but I would like to use a shared server for the secondary server. From
what I’ve seen the shared host will put a prefix on the MySQL database names. How do you
address the fact that it may not be possible to have the same database names? I’ve seen
suggestions to create a link with the required name that points to the database file in
/var/lib/mysql. I can do that on the dedicated server but not on the account I have on a shared
server.
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hey Tommy – Great question. Is your site custom coded? If so, and you have access to the
code that connects to the database, I’d suggest the following: Make a function used to query
the database, but have that function check which server it is on to determine what database
name to use. Odds are the path of the file will be different on the servers, so you can check
for a specific unix user name (home directory) being used. Or you can make a config file
that’s not part of the replicated code and make that different for each server. Hope that helps!
Reply
manoj prashant says:
January 28, 2014 at 10:09 pm
thanku very much for this info
but when a primary server is congested and has many requests can it pass the services to
secondary server???
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Manoj – What you’re looking for is a reverse proxy, also called a load balancer.
Reply
sanjeev says:
February 7, 2014 at 3:23 am
Possibly silly question, but how do you hedge your monitoring server going down? Another level
of monitoring?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Not silly, great question! I rely on DnsMadeEasy’s reliability, which has a proven track record.
Also they check your site from multiple servers all over the world, and only kick in the failover
if it fails to respond from at least 2 different geographic locations. So yes, you’re right that
they could go down, but the chances of your servers going down AND their entire network of
servers going down at the same time are extremely low.
Reply
Visakh says:
February 15, 2014 at 5:42 pm
Thanks for your info.
What is the minimum and maximum time threshold to switch DNS to the slave server, once
master detected problem also, how do we dualdirected sync the configurations and files between
the master and slave servers?
Reply
Koen says:
Great article! I’m currently looking for a good way to create a failover system for our
webapplication and we also make use of cronjobs. What’s the best way to determine whether the
secondary environment is currently active? (To prevent the jobs from sending mails for example)
> Curl in the script?
> Ping
> …
Thanks in advance,
Koen
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
February 24, 2014 at 8:56 pm
Hey Koen –
You can do a DNS lookup with something like http://us1.php.net/gethostbyname and
compare it to the IP address of the primary server.
Good luck!
Reply
David Reid says:
March 26, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Thank you so much for this article. It’s a life saver.
One quick question: If both my primary site and my secondary site go down, is it possible to route
traffic to a page that just has a “site down be back soon” message? (Something that I could put on
a Google site, for instance.)
Thanks again!
David
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
March 26, 2014 at 6:57 pm
Yup, you can set up to 5 levels of failover with DnsMadeEasy, so you could just redirect to
another site if the 2nd site goes down too.
Reply
Anthony says:
April 7, 2014 at 11:30 pm
Hi!
Very nice article, thank you!
But what about dns caching? some users browsers or OSes will cache dns results locally, and
they will go to broken server, isn’t it?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
April 9, 2014 at 6:35 am
Hi Anthony – Yes, that’s a great point. I’ve referenced it above: “One last thing you’ll need to
do is set the TTL to 300 seconds. TTL is the Time To Live, and it means how long DNS
entries should be cached for. The lower the value the quicker DNS will be updated for those
that have already been to your site. It can be set as low as 60 seconds, but 300 is more likely
to be honored by big ISPs who would otherwise use a much larger default value – plus it
lowers our queries per month. “
Reply
eric says:
April 16, 2014 at 5:22 am
really nice tutorial…is there an alternative for dns made easy ?
Reply
Don't want to show yet says:
April 16, 2014 at 5:08 pm
Hi Shane,
Do you do contact work to help people create server failover solutions? If so what is the best way
to contact you?
Reply
Altaf says:
May 8, 2014 at 12:54 pm
Do you offer a paid service. Its too technical for me. I have two dedicated server, one in Utah USA
a dedicated machine and one in my office in UAE on VM, please let me know if you could set it up
for me for a fee.
Reply
Ayush says:
May 27, 2014 at 12:53 am
Awesome thanks for the great article. now i am going to try this out.
Reply
Ganesh R says:
June 2, 2014 at 1:24 am
Hi,
I have a problem with the mysql sync command: “mysqldump –host=1.2.3.4 –user=MYDBUSER
pMYDBPASSWORD
–adddroptable –nocreatedb –skiplocktables MYDBNAME | mysql –user=MYDBUSER
pMYDBPASSWORD MYDBNAME”. As I am having two cpanel accounts for primary and
secondary servers, it’s not possible to have same database table name in both the servers. Kindly
let me know what should I do in the case dbnames are different in both the servers!
And I have one more question, where will this command dump the mysql db in the primary
server? I have tried searching the whole cpanel directories in the primary server for the mysql
dump file, but havent found it. Is it getting directly exported into the secondary server mysql db or
getting dumped first in the primary and then synced along with the other files?
Thanks in advance!
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
June 4, 2014 at 6:41 am
Hi Ganesh – If the database names are different that’s okay, just specify different
MYDBNAMEs in the command. But if the table names are different then you will have to list
out each table name after MYDBNAME in the mysqldump command. See here for examples:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqldump.html
The command does not make a physical file on disk, it simply streams it from one server to
the other so that there’s no cleanup! Hope that helps!
Reply
TheProCoder says:
July 18, 2014 at 5:45 pm
How about sending Primary and Secondary severs IP addresses at once? So visitor can connect
to either one? Without a problem if any one goes down? Is it better? Can this be used to achieve
a 100% uptime?
Reply
Joel D says:
Thanks for the great guide. I’ve the file and database replication happening and am getting ready
to set up the EasyDNS step. For the secondary backup server, do I need to have a dedicated
static IP address or do IP addresses stay the same?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
It doesn’t need to be a dedicated IP address, but it does need to be a different IP address
than the primary.
Reply
Lance says:
October 8, 2014 at 1:22 pm
I need a contractor to set this up for me. Anyone interested?
Reply
Adam B says:
Hi Shane, great tutorial. I’m currently setting this up for a WordPress ecommerce website. Quick
question, if the primary server goes down, and it switches to the secondary server, and someone
makes a change on the secondary site (e,g, makes an order etc, edits a page) will this change be
reflected on the primary server when it comes back online?
Cheers
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
March 4, 2015 at 11:12 pm
Only if you set up mastermaster replication in the database. Otherwise no
Reply
Jenny says:
January 15, 2015 at 12:31 pm
Is there a way to make a load balancer and backup server at the same time? So you still have 2
servers, complete replica’s of each other, and both are used or all traffic is diverted to one if the
other is down? I have a domain that serves content to several news stations across the U.S. most
of which are weather graphics and some very large. I’ve been using CloudFlare to help with the
load, and have not had any slowness issues since turning that one. As of recently I am getting
continuous 522 errors with CloudFlare so I am having to pause the service in order for my server
to respond correctly. I am looking for alternatives and any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Reply
Joni says:
January 22, 2015 at 10:22 am
We use a vhosts file on our primary server. Does the vhosts.cnf need to be copied over or created
on the secondary server also? Our primary server is a turnkey debian for wordpress, and our
secondary server is CentOS, so the file structure is a little different, but I’m assuming that if
everything is where is is supposed to be, it will work. We’re looking forward to testing this soon.
Thank you for the tutorial.
Reply
Younus says:
March 4, 2015 at 10:50 pm
Hi Shane
Thank you for the great post.
I have read that if the users have already opened the site on the primary IP they need to flush
their DNS entry to check the other IP. How true is this>?
I have a lot of visitors on my site and if DNS failover does not work as expected it can cause a
havoc.
Regards,
Younus
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
March 4, 2015 at 11:10 pm
This is true, which is why setting the TTL on your DNS is important. If you set it to a low
amount, like a couple minutes, then it will expire and it’ll force to get the new IP, which is your
backup.
Reply
Jack says:
March 16, 2015 at 12:03 pm
Is it possible to have the secondary backup server acting as the failover monitor as well?
As in, could you set it up so that only 2 servers are involved?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
March 20, 2015 at 10:52 am
Hi Jack – Sure, you could set it up that way, although that would require some work to create
your own independent monitoring system.
Reply
Dhinesh says:
April 26, 2015 at 11:41 pm
I see DNS made easy basic plan($29.95) has an addon feature, Buy Failover for 4.95 for one IP. I
am planning to do that , it will save some cost rather buying Business plan. Do i need to monitor
both the IPs or monitoring primary will do ?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
April 27, 2015 at 7:39 pm
Hey Dhinesh – Great point, this add on is a new option and is much more cost effective for
basic sites. You’ll just need one monitor for your primary IP. Hope that helps!
Reply
Srini says:
April 29, 2015 at 4:00 am
Dear Shane,
Thanks for your answer’s. I am new to this windows IIS. I have 2 quick questions.
1) I need to host 2 website with one public ip address (primary internet) (website1 @
192.168.100.1, website2 @ 192.168.100.2), But my firewall (sonicwall NSA2400) only have the
option to route the port 80 and 443 to one single private ip. website name are registerd with
website1 was in godaddy, Website2 with 1and1. I like to use SSL wild card certificate which was
purchase from godaddy. My server’s are running Windows 2008 R2 with IIS7. If DNS made easy
help for this? or what technology will will to route one public ip to host two different website.
2)If we find the solution, we will route the secondary internet for failover.
Regards
Srini
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hey Srini – sounds like you have a pretty unique scenario, I’d suggest hiring a sysadmin to
get you setup. Good luck!
Reply
Ram J says:
Hi,
First of all this is a post with good explanation. I have a couple of questions regarding sync
between servers. At the worst case consistent data may not be available on a particular server at
that point of time when sync hasn’t happened yet, right?. So I was wondering is it possible to feed
data from the firewall itself to multiple systems in parallel so that there wont be any need to sync
between servers? Kindly educate me if I am wrong. Thanks
Reply
Greg says:
Thx Shane! I want to backup my shared website hosting server to a backup server. Will this work
for all of the websites?
Also, do you do contract work?
Thx!
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Greg – You’d need to follow these instructions for each of your websites/databases.
Yes, I do contact work – you can contact me via shanelabs@gmail.com
Reply
ruel says:
Hi, this is exactly I need, my database is not running on a webbase, its only a local database
server running on my LAN network, Is this the same process I need to setup on my servers?
Thanks you
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Ruel – I don’t see any reason why this wouldn’t work locally. Good luck!
Reply
Tharan Ratnam says:
I have 2 servers set up. I have set up sync with two servers.(each server have website filse and
database) accoring to your instruction. But the website is a intranet. So if one server is down how
can i point my intranet to secondary server. Please advise.
Reply
jafar says:
Hi,
I knew StableHost by reading this Great article and became your referral at 31st March 2015.
I have websites for video collection as:
http://www.watchlatestnews.com/
http://www.zemtvs.com/
These websites publish new posts after every few minutes.
Can i rely your greatly explained method OR it will be complicated for my websites?
I am a little bit afraid, please suggest before i dip in all this work.
Thanks
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Jafar – Glad to hear about your websites! You should be able to use a shared host such
as Stablehost for this method, it is not required that you need a dedicated host. Instead of
using ‘crontab e’, you’ll just use the cron section of cpanel. Hope that helps!
Reply
jafar says:
Thanks for you reply.
Have you misspelled word “error” on line “if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {” in code or it
should be “errno”?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Jafar – Actually, no, it’s correct. mysqli_connect_errno() returns the error
number. See http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli.connecterrno.php
Reply
Kayo says:
May 14, 2016 at 6:58 am
That’s really thniinkg out of the box. Thanks!
Reply
Henrich says:
Possibly it is a stupid question. About DNS FAILOVER.
In the registar of IP1, should I change the NS2 for the name server (ns2.dnsmadeeasy.com)?
And the IP2 must also have the name server changed? Or is unnecessary, just pointing to the
desired IP2?
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Henrich Not sure exactly what you’re asking. Nameservers point to IP addresses, not the
other way around.
Reply
Liji.G says:
Great Article !
We have few queries can you please guide us
1) Do have any tutorial on how to write a script to copy the data back once the primary server is
up.
2) Also we need to know whether both the Servers Primary & Secondary needs to be of similar
configuration & same brand ??
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
Hi Liji –
1) There’s no universal script to copy data back, as it depends on your application, what data
is necessary vs unnecessary, how often you do the sync, etc. Sometimes if your data rarely
changes you don’t need this. I’d suggest having a developer take care of this.
2) Both servers don’t need to be exactly the same, they just both need to be able to run your
website. It’s completely acceptable to have your backup server smaller in size and speed.
Reply
Esther says:
Thank you for the article.
I have questions about a secondary server. When the primary server is working good, how does
the secondary server behave? Of course I don’t need to purchase domain name for secondary,
right? And the secondary could be accessed with ip only? So I can check if the backup is being
done.
Reply
jafar says:
Command to run if remote/primaryserver is not using standard port for ssh
rsync avz e “ssh p PortNumber” primaryuser@1.2.3.4:/home/mywebsite/public_html
/home/secondarywebsite/public_html
Reply
Anuj Chaudhary says:
January 30, 2016 at 11:10 am
I have one domain which is registered as example (abc.com) with Bigrock and having with a local
IIS server where I have 2025 websites and also I have two different ISP with multiple public IPs.
So can I setup own Single Name Server for (abc.com) domain as well as failover DNS must work
if one internet line goes down. because I don’t want migrate my domain to “DNSmade easy”
Hope you will response very soon.
Reply
Scott Charters says:
I have had the DNS Made Easy system for years and it works very well for our clients who has 3
domains on their server, which we have backed up on our main server (for all other clients). We
are getting ready to install an SSL cert on the main domain and wondered about how to set up
certs for the same domain on 2 different servers. Anybody done that? Any special instructions on
how to do it?
Reply
Sheik says:
We are integrating ecommerce website. Can we accommodate failover on this? Because we
integrated payment gateways.
Could you please advise us?
Reply
Divakar says:
I need to know that if we have a one switch for one server and for its replica and the other one is
for other server an its replica, somehow one switch goes down what do we do.
How we can make a failover so we will not face this situation.
I want to know by using hardware and by using an application failover.
Reply
Ingo Steinbach says:
April 19, 2016 at 2:34 am
Great article!
Question: Does this failover also work with ssl connections? You can’t just swop the server without
the ssl going ballistic?
Thanks, Ingo
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
April 19, 2016 at 8:25 am
Great question! Yes, it will work with SSL, you just have to make sure you have the same
SSL cert installed both on the primary and backup servers.
Reply
Rampravesh das says:
July 23, 2018 at 4:54 am
Hi
Good morning
I have two ISP connection so we are using two different gateway but problem if one ISP
down
Then we are going each system and change gateway , my LAN gateway is 192.168.1.1
other LAN gateway 192.168.1.2 ,so please tell which server can I configure to route all
traffic a single gateway if second is down please ….
Reply
Kyotoguys says:
May 3, 2016 at 7:02 pm
My failoverserver can’t send out the mail. I’m currently doing the Ping Application for my
company. My technical head says the problem is mail server settings, is that correct? And how to
find the mail server settings problem. Kindly assist me for this problem. Thank you
Reply
Chuck M. says:
August 4, 2016 at 3:10 pm
Hi Shane. We want to implement this approach but I dont feel comfortable doing this myself. Can
you recommend someone that has the expertise to do this for us on a quote basis?
Reply
Kartik Agrawal says:
October 6, 2016 at 7:28 am
assume that i have two servers and i am managing a website of songs or any software on first
server if i m publishing any song then the user will visit my website if clicks on download option
then that downloading will start from second server so that the speed of both the servers will not
slow…….
so Please Help Me how can i do this…..???
Reply
Gerald Watkins says:
November 2, 2016 at 9:39 am
Have you happened to come up with a way to do this without third party licensing? Something like
a couple cheap servers acting as nameservers checking that script? It seems DNS Made Easy is
pricier that this original article indicates for failover. I would appreciate any thoughts you have
here.
Reply
michael turner says:
March 4, 2017 at 3:53 pm
How do you handle User BookMarks? After failover a different IP is used
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
April 20, 2017 at 11:06 am
Bookmarks are at the domain/page level, they don’t save IPs
Reply
Joe says:
March 31, 2017 at 4:58 am
Very detailed, Thanks bunch
Reply
vern says:
May 17, 2017 at 3:41 pm
does the dns made easy work for intranet sites or just internet.
Reply
ClapperTrapper says:
June 1, 2017 at 8:07 pm
Hi Shane
Wow – you must be busy with all the help requests!
Thanks for this great article. It seems not much has changed since 2013 when you wrote this –
Hosting providers still don’t really provide an easy failover solution unless you pay big bucks!
However, it would be great to see an updated version for 2017!
Recently, I have been toying with replicated cloud instances – one on vultr and one in digital
ocean – different DCs – and using Cloudflare failover DNS.
Do you have a server control panel you’d recommend? What do you use for your OS?
I am thinking Sentora / Nginx and master – master replication.
Reply
khumbi says:
March 14, 2018 at 2:50 am
Hi, im akhum from nagaland india actully i want help to know about the server,our main link from
office we can use net but to the clint end we face like it disconnect and when we try after few
minute the net it work please help me to solve this problem
Reply
Ray S says:
April 20, 2018 at 10:26 pm
Based on this article, I’ve set up my secondary server (on A2 hosting) with DNSME monitoring the
primary (Bluehost VPS). However, one of my sites is being attacked once in a while with DDOS. I
have Wordfence attached, but it’s not doing anything. Bluehost tells me to have Cloudflare and
others have said use Sucuri.
However, for me to use both services, I would need to change the nameservers to Cloudflare’s (or
Sucuri’s), thereby not having DNSME’s monitoring/switching service in place.
How do I have BOTH Cloudflare’s DDOS protection AND DNSME’s switching service? And if I
can’t have this, how do I have DSNME and DDOS protection (in other words, I want great DDOS
protection and DNSME’s switching ability). Thanks!
Reply
James says:
May 1, 2018 at 4:27 pm
Excellent article, very useful!
Have you considered using a server like RDS as a central database for both primary and
secondary server?
It trims a lot of the fat out of the process and then of course a DNS failover system that points to
the secondary server in the event of a specified error code (ie 500)?
Using RDS automates backups too.
Reply
Shane Helpton says:
August 14, 2018 at 9:38 am
Yes, RDS is a great central database to consider. Thanks for the tip!
Reply
rajesh singh says:
June 11, 2018 at 6:10 am
IF my website hosted on one server and i want to manage failover , according your above given
steps – need to put the source code on another server. So what you u think i need to map also
with another server ip with same domain or need to put only into directory on a another server
location?
my query summary is that, how “DNS Made Easy” will manage for different server.
plz confirm in details what i need to do exactly on different server for put the source code, so in
case failover , auto point with different IP?
Thanks
Reply
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rsync -avz primaryuser@1.2.3.4:/home/mywebsite/public_html

mysqldump --host=1.2.3.4 --user=MYDBUSER -pMYDBPASSWORD --add-drop-

//perform simple query

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