[mrb]

The browser would time out after a few minutes. However if the user stops loading the page and hits Reload, the browser will try another IP and the page will load successfully. I verified this behavior with Chrome. For a personal blog, that's definitely "good enough" HA.

[fudged71]

If a webpage I view hangs on loading, I'm going to bounce and not come back. Because it's just a blog makes me less inclined to wait it out.

[honkhonkpants]

When you think back on it, this was the true genius behind RSS aggregators. I could still read your blog when your blog was not working, because Google Reader (or your favorite aggregator) had already downloaded it once. It's too bad that RSS died.

[fudged71]

Yes! Absolutely.

[mrb]

True. However this specific type of failure should be relatively rare. I expect most of my outages to be either network issues or a powered off machine (TCP timeout) or the web service is not running (TCP RST). Accepting a connection and not replying is just rare for something as dumb as an HTTP request for a static file.