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WorldwideDNS.net does not provide true Load Balancing and Failover DNS services but you can use WorldwideDNS.net to setup something similar because WorldwideDNS.net supports Round Robin DNS and has a DNS API that can be called from a third-party monitoring service.

For example, let's say that you have a website, mystore.com, that is being served by two different web servers in different data centers. Each web server has an identical copy of the website. The IP number of the Web Server 1 is 1.1.1.1 and the IP number of Web Server 2 is 2.2.2.2.

The first thing you would do is purchase a Dynamic DNS account for mystore.com at WorldwideDNS.net and setup the DNS. You will want to use a Dynamic DNS account so you can lower the TTL so you can change the DNS quickly if a web server fails. Next you would add two www A records, one for each web server:

www IN A 1.1.1.1
www IN A 2.2.2.2

When the www A record is requested, 50% of the time 1.1.1.1 will be returned and 50% of the time 2.2.2.2 will be returned. If you want 1.1.1.1 to be returned more, add another www A record for it like this:

www IN A 1.1.1.1
www IN A 2.2.2.2
www IN A 1.1.1.1

Now 1.1.1.1 will returned 2/3 of the time and 2.2.2.2 will be returned 1/3 of the time. This handles the simple Load Balancing functionality.

For the Failover service, you will need to setup a URL monitoring service or script. There are many websites that provide monitoring services and there are many scripts, some free, that can be used for monitoring. An example website is SiteUptime.com. A popular commercial desktop application is Servers Alive. The service you pick will need to be able to call a URL when it generates an alert. SiteUptime callse this a Webhook. The URL will be one of the URLs from our DNS API. More than likely, all you will need to call is the API function to update one record type.

In this example, let's say your monitoring script notices that Web Server 1 at 1.1.1.1 is down. It would call this web page to change all www A records to 2.2.2.2.

https://www.worldwidedns.net/api_dns_modify_dynamic.asp?NAME=your_id& PASSWORD=your_password&DOMAIN=mystore.com&S=www&T=A&D=2.2.2.2

This would change all www A records from 1.1.1.1 to 2.2.2.2. When Web Server 1 comes back online, you would need to login to WorldwideDNS.net and change the DNS back to the normal DNS using the Standard DNS Manager.

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