[TeMPOraL]

DNS should have a mechanism for designating failover IPs, so you could e.g. host a static HTML saying "it's down" on some CDN as far as possible topologically from the rest of your network, so it displays when your status page is down too.

However, status pages are first and foremost marketing tools, so I wouldn't expect anyone setting such mechanism up.

[marcosdumay]

You know, there's a proposal of treating HTTP names the same way SMTP works. That proposal includes adding low-priority servers that should be used only when the high priority fails.

All the mainstream browsers have already said they won't ever implement it.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I suppose that gets filed next to "browsers should really let us use SRV records to point at websites":\

[marcosdumay]

SRV records are the thing I was talking about.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Oh, neat! Thanks for pointing that out; I somehow got this far in life without realizing that SRV records have priority and weight fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record has a decent summary) - I only knew that they let you specify a port, which would already be a huge advantage. Darn, now I'm even more annoyed that browsers don't handle them:(

[TeMPOraL]

> All the mainstream browsers have already said they won't ever implement it.

Do you know what is their rationale?

[marcosdumay]

The one rationale I know is that there is a competitive issue, where the first browser to adopt it will have slightly slower page loads, but won't gain anything yet because no site uses it.

The slightly slower page loads is one extra round trip to the DNS server (that is supposed to be close to you). It can be solved at the DNS side, and last time I looked, about a decade ago, was indeed solved at the default configuration of most open-source servers. But the large providers don't use the default configuration of their servers.