Keep your website up and running

Round-Robin DNS + Failover

Cloud failover service – We check your websites periodically and, if a website becomes unhealthy, perform a failover to backup servers (by using the Cloudflare® API)

Start your free 7-day trial

No credit card required.

Instant Failover

No DNS propagation time. Failover is done within seconds (when in Cloudflare proxy mode).

Easy Setup

If you already have multiple servers in place, setting up the Round-Robin DNS entries and our failover solution only takes minutes.

Safe

We remove not working entries from the DNS pool. One entry always remains, so your domain stays resolveable.

Affordable

Starting at $4.95/month. No need for to implement and maintain your own failover solution. See our pricing

The popular Round-Robin DNS configuration is great to distribute traffic and load between servers with a minimum of effort (DNS load balancing).
But if one of the servers fails, the IP address will still be handed out to the clients.

With failover.cc you can add health checks and dynamic configuration to your server pool1.

What is the Round-Robin DNS configuration?

Basically, setup is done by adding multiple DNS entries for the same domain name, pointing to the servers in the pool, i.e.:

example.com 10.0.0.1
example.com 10.0.0.2
example.com 10.0.0.3

Clients get a different IP address for a DNS query each time, and that way load gets distributed between servers. This is a great setup, implemented in minutes.

The problem is: if one of the servers in the pool goes down, clients will still get the IP address – resulting in a timeout or error page.

The solution

To protect the round-robin setup against failure, we included the "remove DNS record" mode for our failover checks.

If the primary server of the check fails, this DNS entry will be removed from the lookup-pool. DNS queries will not return the IP address of the broken server any more, so a failover to the remaining servers is active.

We do this by modifying the domain name only and not remove it completely. This is a lot safer than removing entries in Cloudflare DNS settings – you still can see changes at a glance and have full control in case of problems.

To be safe, we will also never change the last remaining entry for the domain, so your domain name always resolves.

So, what is the failover time ?

If you are using the Cloudflare proxy mode ("orange cloud"), the broken IPs will be removed instantly, after a failing server has been detected. Clients will not access the broken server any more, because Cloudflare only routes traffic to the remaining servers. This is the best solution for minimum failover time.

If you do not want your site traffic going through the Cloudflare network (non-proxy mode, DNS only), new DNS query responses will not include the broken servers any more within seconds, but the responses can be cached on client/ISP side for several minutes. This is a good setup for reliable and fast DNS hosting.

picture of a round robin ;)

1 By using the Cloudflare API. Requires a Cloudflare account and your domains set up in DNS settings.