[vruiz]

> Name a business that has not had a 30 second outage in the past year?

It's not a 30 second outage! Your domain will keep resolving the bad IP. Even with an extremely low TTL (also not recomendable) ISP's DNS will cache it and even some will ignore your TTL. A big portion of all new users will keep hitting the bad IP.

Anyway, I won't try to convince you to change your setup if you are happy with it, but it's obvious from the comments that I'm not the only one thinking it's a suboptimal solution, so at least some of us won't be considering DO for HA systems given the circumstances.

[brianwawok]

> It's not a 30 second outage! Your domain will keep resolving the bad IP. Even with an extremely low TTL (also not recomendable) ISP's DNS will cache it and even some will ignore your TTL. A big portion of all new users will keep hitting the bad IP.

So with 5 load balancers, 1/5 of customers see a one time hit of 30 seconds (after which they return to full speed).

What better solution for the same price do you propose to get HA on a budget cloud provider?

[vruiz]

> What better solution for the same price do you propose to get HA on a budget cloud provider?

Nothing, your solution is obviously better than having none and it's enough for your needs. But the original discussion was about what's needed for DO to become a competitor for big business, not low budget, there they are already king.

Normally you want at least IP failover, meaning that you get an IP and can be rerouted to a different server with an simple API call. At work we use hetzner, which is not exactly a high-end provider but offers it: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Failover/en

Then, can be even better if the provider offers this HA-load balancer as a service, so you don't have to setup anything.

You might still need DNS failover to recover from a full datacenter going offline.