Looking for a cheaper solution than amazon CloudFront, I placed two "A" records with different IPs to different servers on the same subdomain in a NameSever managed by GoDaddy in order to achieve some kind of load balancing and fail over mechanism for static files in my website.
Check it out: nslookup static.hsbnoticias.com
SOME OBSERVATIONS
- I have seen some articles about DNS round-robin load balancing but I have been unable to understand if this can be done with any DNS service or if it requires some special software or service.
- I have not found any service providers for such a service
- Testing nslookup on the facebook CDN returns multiple IPs in different order every time which I guess is the proper way to do DNS load balancing
- My NameServer returns the IPs in the same order every time
QUESTIONS
- Is the load going to be distributed between the two servers?
- Is there a standard behavior that browsers tend to follow while resolving domains with multiple IPs on page resources? (Timeout, fallback, etc...)
- How does the randomized (or fixed) order of the records returned by the name server affect load balancing?
- Will browser try different IPs when the one they're using becomes slow, or only when it triggers a timeout?
- Will IP Fail Over be transparent to the user, or is the user going to need to reload the page?
