What im looking for is terminology, or some sort of technology that will monitor httpd service on one server, if it ever goes down to move DNS to my secondary server.

What i have is:

two servers: one on dreamhost and the other with hostgator. My primary host is dreamhost unfortunately just because of its bandwidth/disk space provisions. Hostgator cannot compete with this. Dreamhost tends to go down quite a bit, so ideally im looking for either a script or some way of monitoring Dreamhost's status, if it goes down for ~1 hr or whatever the nameservers are automatically xfered to hostgator.

Any info?

We use http://pingdom.com for Zymic though not sure how you'll get it to switch DNS, you might have to write a provision in for that, maybe have a script that monitors an email account and takes the necessary provisions.

Interesting.
The forum currently is free to users and i do not generate ad revenue. So a one time fee or a very low monthly fee is ideal. Although i do love the interface that pingdom uses. Anymore ideas would be great.

Set a 3rd and 4th name server to your secondary site. Then, if 1 and 2 fail, your visitors will be sent to your other server.

WARNING - I've never heard of this being done, but I see no reason why it won't work. Also, it will be messy if you have to resync MySQL db's - but that would be the case with any method you use.

Swordz

Thanks,
They all use the same SQL server, its just apache.