CODEWITHSUNDEEP
http-redirectdns
Brien Malone
Brien Malone

Reputation: 613

How should I temporarily redirect a website to a different domain?

We are powering down our data center for 12-18 hours during an infrastructure audit. We need to post a 'temporarily unavailable' message on websites affected by this outage.

In the past, I have changed the A-Record for the websites domain names to point to site hosted by a third party. The DNS changes appear to be instantaneous, but I worry about the potential 48 hour propagation lag.

Is there a better way to temporarily redirect a site during an outage?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 254

Answers (2)

Brien Malone
Brien Malone

Reputation: 613

I ended up using a reverse proxy. We use CloudFlare for DNS. I recently upgraded our service to their Business license. This allowed me to create a simple HTML page response for specific HTTP errors (>500 for example), which handles site outages nicely. I was even able to embed images using base64 encoding so it wouldn't be dependent on an image host.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/reverse-proxy/

Upvotes: 0

Pascal Belloncle
Pascal Belloncle

Reputation: 11389

Since there won't be any server at the existing ip, you don't have any other option.

To minimize the propagation issue, a few days ahead of the time you need to switch, you should decrease the TTL of the A record to something very short (like a few minutes), which should force clients and dns servers to query your dns more often.

Upvotes: 2

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