Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre-Marie Baty
Anyhow, what sort of manners are these ? If I were a hosting provider, I would AT LEAST send an email to my customers telling them that from time t1 to t2
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I agree. totally, but
after hosting dedicated servers 24/7 on the internet since 1994, with 4 different providers, I have found it doesn't happen. They just go down now and then. You can call and scream at them, you can take the price breaks written in your contract for the service going down but it will still happen, unfortunately.
The best thing to do is have your DNS setup with a register that has dynamic DNS (I use dotyou.com) and have a back up server somewhere that has one web page that says the server is down for maintenance check back later. This server could even be at someone home sitting on DSL since it is just serving a small web page, performance will still be ok even for a lot of hits. Then when you see the site is down kick in your dynamic DNS to point the domain to the back up server.
This process can be automated using the IE web control to create a custom browser to check the web site every 30 seconds to make sure it gets a response. If it doesn't it can browse to the domain name registrar service and set DNS to the back up ip address. It can them keep monitoring the main server to see when it comes back on line and set the IP back to the main server’s IP. This way everyone will either get the main web site or a page telling them to check back.
Dynamic DNS works very well. It is amazing how fast the world knows about the IP change at their local DNS server.
If you want a sample VC++ project that shows how to do this let me know I will send it. I have done a number of projects for companies that use custom web browsers. But you may want to take a look at doing this in Java.
Nova " Well, luckily this wasnt at daytime ..."
Daytime for who? :-)