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I'm trying to figure out how I can set up a disaster recovery for clients that manage their own domains. I have a web server.

For DR purposes, I want to replicate this server and when/if disaster strikes - swap my clients over with relative ease and without them manually updating their A records.

My problem is that I don't manage their domains. They point their domain's A records to my web server's IP. So rather than getting them to update their A record I'm trying to find an alternative solution.

I thought i would be able to set up a CNAME record on my end that points to an A record that I could update myself, and then ask the client to have a CNAME rather than an A record on their domain but it looks as though that is not an appropriate solution.

Right now, it seems like i should just swap out the production server for the dr server under the same IP but i would appreciate any alternatives.

Vinc3nt
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  • We use windows NT backup right now, it has a 60 minutes delay to recover (Often DR depends how immediate responses you require). We are shifting our lightweight server to k8 pods, which has a very robust recovery plan and the recovery is immediate. – Nazia Jahan Trisha Apr 21 '20 at 08:38

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The problem is usually that you can't have a CNAME at the root of a domain, like example.com.

The best way around this is to set up replication between your server and their, then set up a load balancer somewhere that forwards requests to your and their server. Then they can point their A records to the IP address of the load balancer, and you can configure the load balancer to only forward requests to your server if the primary server goes down. This way, you have almost zero downtime, and the failover will happen automatically.

Stuggi
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