Redundant Web Server DNS Setup?

I am setting up a second redundant web server to give us fail over protection
if our primary web server/hosting company go down. The secondary web server
is located at another data center on the other side of the country. If our
primary server goes down I want all web page requests to immediately get
routed to the back up server, but I'm not sure how to get this to happen. The
DNS a record for the domain specifies the specific IP address of the primary
web server. If I have to change the DNS to point to the secondary server, it
will take too long to propagate, and we will potentially go down for up to 48
hours for some users.

Is there any way to set up DNS A records similar to MX records, so that it
has multiple entries and tries each one in order of precedence and stops at
the first one that works?

What other solutions are there for this problem? How are other people
approaching this?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

"Dan" <Dan.TakeThisOut@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:290CB486-C265-4B14-8879-FB70097F4C68@microsoft.com...
 > I am setting up a second redundant web server to give us fail over
protection
 > if our primary web server/hosting company go down. The secondary web
server
 > is located at another data center on the other side of the country. If our
 > primary server goes down I want all web page requests to immediately get
 > routed to the back up server, but I'm not sure how to get this to happen.
The
 > DNS a record for the domain specifies the specific IP address of the
primary
 > web server. If I have to change the DNS to point to the secondary server,
it
 > will take too long to propagate, and we will potentially go down for up to
48
 > hours for some users.
 >
 > Is there any way to set up DNS A records similar to MX records, so that it
 > has multiple entries and tries each one in order of precedence and stops
at
 > the first one that works?
 >
 > What other solutions are there for this problem? How are other people
 > approaching this?
 >
 > Any advice is greatly appreciated.
 >

Here's a suggestion; don't use DNS for that at all.

DNS can do random round robbin, but in that case both servers are always
serving requests, and you would get half the traffic go down when one server
did anyway.

You need to look into something like Akami's caching services to do what you
want to do, or get a dynamic route that can flop between the two
datacenters... or a dedicated line between to carry traffic to the other
should one be offline....

Either way, mucho $$$$$<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->