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Looking for a cheaper solution than amazon CloudFront, I placed two "A" records with different IPs to different servers on the same subdomain in a NameSever managed by GoDaddy in order to achieve some kind of load balancing and fail over mechanism for static files in my website.

Check it out: nslookup static.hsbnoticias.com

SOME OBSERVATIONS

  • I have seen some articles about DNS round-robin load balancing but I have been unable to understand if this can be done with any DNS service or if it requires some special software or service.
  • I have not found any service providers for such a service
  • Testing nslookup on the facebook CDN returns multiple IPs in different order every time which I guess is the proper way to do DNS load balancing
  • My NameServer returns the IPs in the same order every time

QUESTIONS

  1. Is the load going to be distributed between the two servers?
  2. Is there a standard behavior that browsers tend to follow while resolving domains with multiple IPs on page resources? (Timeout, fallback, etc...)
  3. How does the randomized (or fixed) order of the records returned by the name server affect load balancing?
  4. Will browser try different IPs when the one they're using becomes slow, or only when it triggers a timeout?
  5. Will IP Fail Over be transparent to the user, or is the user going to need to reload the page?
jacmkno
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  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS "Round robin DNS should not solely be relied upon for service availability. If a service at one of the addresses in the list fails, the DNS will continue to hand out that address and clients will still attempt to reach the inoperable service." – ceejayoz Nov 14 '15 at 18:41
  • I also question how CloudFront could possibly be more expensive than a second server. Even if that's true, CloudFlare is free and provides similar tooling. – ceejayoz Nov 14 '15 at 18:41
  • Huge traffic makes CloudFront and all CDN solutions I found way too expensive. I used CloudFront for two days and it ripped out of 56 bucks. I achieved similar results with a single VPS for static files for a month with half that amount. Of course I loose other features but at least is something I can pay for... – jacmkno Nov 14 '15 at 18:47
  • $56 in two days for CloudFront means you're transferring multiple terabytes per month. I wouldn't be confident that GoDaddy is going to allow you to sustain that level of transfer indefinitely. – ceejayoz Nov 14 '15 at 18:55
  • I only use GoDaddy for DNS. The servers are in Linode. – jacmkno Nov 14 '15 at 18:57
  • This thread seems to have the answers, but they are not easy to extract. I'm still trying to make sense of the whole of it: http://serverfault.com/questions/69870/multiple-data-centers-and-http-traffic-dns-round-robin-is-the-only-way-to-assur?rq=1 – jacmkno Nov 14 '15 at 19:00

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