CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsherokudns
Stevula
Stevula

Reputation: 111

Possible to redirect/render custom error page if domain down?

I'm working on a Rails app that is hosted on Heroku and has a custom domain configured to point to the Heroku DNS target. In other words, it can be accessed at both appname.herokuapp.com and appname.com.

The owner of the app experienced an issue recently where the domain name registrar mistakenly deactivated the domain due to an error in recording the subscription payment. The issue has since been resolved, but the owner wants to know if we can set up a custom error page to show in this situation, instead of the browser error page that would normally show in this case.

I am a novice developer, but my suspicion is that this is not possible. If the registrar believed at the time that the domain did not belong to the person, why would they allow that person to decide the error page or redirect to an alternate version of the site?

Am I correct on this or is there an alternative solution?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 76

Answers (1)

Michael B
Michael B

Reputation: 12228

Since DNS resolves appname.com to an IP Address. then if DNS is unavailable the machine trying to resolve the address won't have an address to connect to to get the website from.

If the DNS records have a long TTL (time to live - basically the time that it takes to flush the name from the cache of nameservers) then it will stay online even if the DNS server is offline. However this would only work for nameservers that have previously resolved those records.

Upvotes: 1

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