[Chuck Moreland]

I moved my site last night to a new hosting provider. The DNS propagation was surprisingly fast, I was getting traffic within a couple hours.

My old provider is still down - goodbye! I won't be back.

I understand the propagation delay issue with my "ghetto" redundant server idea above. How about this idea instead:

2 servers, each from a different hosting provider and with static IPs. I use a self-managed nameserver, which is my means of controlling the swapover. Normally all traffic goes to the server designated as primary.

In the event the primary goes down, I change the IP at the namerservers to point to the secondary server.

It's not hot-standby, but at least I should be able to redirect traffic within minutes of identifying the outage.

The secondary server doesn't really have to be fully current, I can update it as soon as the problem is identified. I don't keep any mission-critical databases on the web server.

Would that work?