the bảohouse

Making Your Custom-Domain Tumblr a Little More Robust

One of Tumblr’s server went down today. It happens to be the one which is used to dish out webpages for those of us using a custom domain name (e.g. www.baohouse.net as opposed to baohouse.tumblr.com). Tumblr isn’t as fault-tolerant as I thought it was. However, there were other Tumblr servers that were still running fine.

So here’s a technique they don’t tell you that will make your Tumblr blog a little more robust. Remember when they said to add an A record with 72.32.231.8 as the value? Well, that’s just one server. What if that server goes down? Then you’re just out of luck. So let’s add multiple A records (yes, all of them!).

• 50.22.53.155
• 50.22.53.157
• 72.32.231.8
• 174.121.98.156
• 174.121.66.230
• [UPDATE: Here’s additional IPs as of 2012]
• 50.97.149.180
• 50.97.149.181
• 50.97.149.182
• 50.97.149.183
• 66.6.44.4 

This image shows a typical A record scheme in GoDaddy. Your circumstance may be a little different. In this case @ = baohouse.net but you can put blog.baohouse.net in the host field if that is the address you want to use.

So if the first one goes down, your browser will move on to the second server, and if that goes down, to the third, and so on. For the techies out there, this is called a round-robin DNS technique.

I then use WhatsMyDNS.net to see if the record changes have been updated around the world. Usually it takes a few hours for the major/common servers to get the update.

Also, for those of you whose domain registrar only allows for a single A record, you may want to consider using another DNS provider. You can still keep the domain with your current registrar, just use a different name server.

I would appreciate it if you can reblog this and let your custom domain-using friends know.