I'm moving a domain's nameservers from the registrar to dnsmadeasy.com so that we can have automatic failover (among other benefits). When I've done this in the past I simply set the TTL value as low as it can go (1 minute) for the A record so that upon failure of the primary server the backup server is (nearly) immediately online.
The only issue that I can find with a low TTL is that we will have "higher query traffic". Is this a bad thing? Contrarily, are there benefits to using a high TTL value?