This is the kind of service I'd love to attack as a side project, it's fascinating. Though I'm sure someone out there reading this, has something like this service but affordable for startups?
There is a lot of room in this market for competition from open source projects. Really, the concept is so simple that it could be done with a shell script for simple failover:
(pseudo code)
if (curl http://ip of main site) fails then
copy alternate zone file to bind dir
service named reload
fi
You get the idea... F5 Networks is really just a fancy DNS server running on a BSD based OS on an x86 appliance. Zeus, which another commentor mentioned, has an AWS version and will let you run it on your own hardware if you like.
I'd love to see some open source competition for this space, or even low price competition.
>I'd love to see some open source competition for this space, or even low price competition.
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Running our own failover system is not just expensive, but time-consuming - just another thing to do when you are trying to scale and time is already short within a small team.
Several DNS hosting services do this at varying costs. DurableDNS (which I founded but have sold) does it at a low cost. It's fairly trivial softwarewise as long as you have the redundant hardware, DCs, etc.
