Code Emitter

Seems that DNS is not the cure I hoped for. I should have thought about this earlier, seems that my insight is a little bit late ;).

Explanation:

The replies that our own nameservers generate are either way reparsed by internet providers, and even with a TTL set to 0 some ISPs seem to cache anyway. Because of this is does not ultimately matter how small timeouts and what loadbalancing scheme our nameservers use -> the ISP’s caches understand round-robin only and will in some cases cache for at least 1 minute or so anyway. Of course it is possible to distribute the load to multiple servers and to implement basic failover and this is fine, but you cannot weight the different servers. For example my provider filters out all duplicate A records, so that it is not possible to do a weighting like 5xA, 2xB, 1xC. The aux config value in MyDNS is also useless because of the mentioned fact that ISP caches don’t even know the aux values and do thoughtless round-robin of the unweighted data only.

As a result of this I am trying LVS now but I am pretty sure that our hosting company will block the response packets – this is why I did not try it before. I decided to head for LVS with tunneling and I quickly set up a testing environment. Currently I am not sure if I am doing something wrong or the theory is correct, that response packets (which are sent on behalf of other physical machines) are blocked by the routers/switchports.

If all this stuff does not work, I am against my will and knowledge forced back to the http proxy/fastcgi backend SPOF stoneage cave. Depressing.

So…given the following facts….does anybody know another good hosting company where customer wishes have at least a minimal chance to become true? :-(

• HTTP proxies become ineconomic when it comes to more than X TB traffic/month per machine
• FastCGI backends suck because you are permanently fixing them (and includes point 1)
• I have no money for a double pack of high available hardware loadbalancers
• Even if I had, I have no idea where to locate them for small money (mostly because of traffic and the need to place all real servers in the same network…)
• DNS is not the cure, too (see above)
• Moreover I have no money to rent a nice cluster at Hosteurope or similar :-)
• At Hetzner it seems to be impossible to get some sort of a virtual IP or routing exception set up so that you cannot do anything even if you have the knowlege
• Apart from this Hetzner seems to be the best/keen hosting company available atm
• A fortiori I have no money for a leased dedicated line…and of course no location for this ;-)

Heh, it’s enough to drive you up the wall. Or am I just expecting too much for too few money? It could be so simple :-).