How do you guys re-route traffic for your load balancer to another in another data center? If you change your DNS record it would take x time before it has propagated.

Say I have one server setup on Linode London and one duplicated on DO Amsterdam. How do I quickly re-route the traffic from my two main load balancers London to Amsterdam without much propagation time?

Keep TTL's low (3-5 minutes). Things don't have to happen instantly. Clients understand. You had a bad day on the Internet. Guess what, stuff happens. Remember when "XYZ company down for 2 hours" made headlines? Yeah, that was a long time ago. Downtime is more or less accepted these days. Sure, some hothead customers will flip out and leave. You were probably not going to meet their expectations sometime and lose them eventually. Let them become someone else's nightmare.*

* This is for an answer for the average "Hey I run a website or two" question. If you're asking and you are dealing with financial transactions or ad networks, well, you're asking in the wrong place and you should probably hire someone that knows how BGP anycasting works.

>* This is for an answer for the average "Hey I run a website or two" question. If you're asking and you are dealing with financial transactions or ad networks, well, you're asking in the wrong place and you should probably hire someone that knows how BGP anycasting works.

Eh, usually you just bgp anycast the DNS server. If you anycast just your DNS server, you are pretty much in the same pickle as if you host your dns with someone else who runs a reliable dns server (and have them do the anycast) - the pickle is that there's a minimum ttl.

Now you can set up a redirector server and anycast that, and like 3xx redirect all your requests (or more often just the first request) and that's better, really, 'cause that redirect can be changed quickly and on a per-request (or more often per-session) basis... but while I know a thousand companies that will sell you anycast DNS service, I don't know anyone who will sell someone with a vps customer budget an anycast'd redirector service.

You cab use round-robin DNS ... Keep two DB in sync between different hosts/providers and effectively switch the DNS if host1 or host2 goes down. However this setup is easy for a kind of applications but may not be suited for other kind of apps.

We use a CDN. They provide caching and act as another layer of defense beyond the origin datacenter/provider.

Because they physically route the traffic, you can change backends pretty quickly and have traffic going to the new destination within seconds or minutes. Using DNS for end-users just has too much unpredictable latency, but it works well for routing the backend.

What's the current status for Database failover? MySQL in my case - to mirror that is what's been holding me back.

What happens with 1/10 second's database records not replicated? That could be a successful transaction on one, and no record of it on the other?

> What happens with 1/10 second's database records not replicated?

You can use a multi-master setup and strict consistency checks, though.

Multi-master MySQL is generally regarded to be a very, very bad idea. Single master with multiple GTID replicas and promoting a replica to master upon failure is BCOP.

Certainly what we're in the process of doing.

I'm surprised you haven't completely jumped ship already, considering that there are two other providers in particular that offer very similar specs and prices to Linode. Where I work, we moved our primary infrastructure off of Linode the night after the attacks started.

I've tried a lot over the years, no one can compare to the VPS quality Linode provides is what I found.

All (major) providers suffer from DDoS attacks.

When was the last successful sustained (1 week plus) CloudFlare, GCE, or AWS DDoS attack?

I have no idea.

CloudFlare doesn't offer VPS instances. Google and Amazon are in a league of their own and, last I checked, don't offer the similar services at the same prices with the same level of support and same controls. Amazon might send you a nice bill at the end of the attack depending on what type it was.

DigitalOcean, as an example, routinely receives DDoS attacks and will just nullroute your VPS automatically until the attack ends.

Its a concern of mine with AWS, no downtime but a $30k for the day of fun bill. Got to tie up this loose end before I wake up broke one day.

There are VPS providers that offer DDoS protection in the 10-20Gbps range, but that is a piddle in the ocean these days.

Which ones and protection against what attacks?

Ramnode, Vultr, others.