Could a Load Balancer or Floating IP solve the problem of a blacklisted IP?

Greeting Steemit Family

After experiencing some challenges with our server last year, I took on the task of finding a fix this year. My studies in AWS upgraded my knowledge of server management. Our droplet(servers) are offered by an American company, Digital Ocean, which we then configure. We have been hosting our clients with no problems until last year when one of the IPs assigned to the droplet was banned.

So, we have more than one project hosted on a single server. If the IP is blacklisted, all the projects running on the server will suffer the effect. This is because they are using a single IP which is the unique identifier of the Droplet (server). The client will not have a direct understanding of this concept, because their domain helps too.

Now, while trying to fix the problem. I had to back up and destroy the droplet(server) to create a new droplet(server). To make sure we do not lose project data, but now I have created downtime for the projects. The time I will take to update the DNS A records for all the domains using the server. The projects will be suffering downtime which is not good for their visitors.

Now, I have been looking at how to avoid downtime or reduce the downtime. We have two practical options, that is a Load balancer or a Floating IP. If you are not a server administrator, you are asking the question. What are Load balancers or Floating IPs? Now I will be hoping you have an idea of an IP. I did mention that IPs are unique identifiers for a droplet(server). So let me give a layman's understanding of a Load balancer or Floating IP. You can still find time and do more reading on it online.

Load Balancer is used to ensure high availability if you are working with more than one droplet(server). That means you will be offered a static IP, which will help to share(distribute) the traffic across the multiple droplets (server). Remember I said IPs are unique identifiers to a droplet, but the load balance provides a static IP that stays the same but accesses different droplets(servers).

Now, this will not solve my case. Yes, we have multiple droplets(servers). But the different droplets(servers) hold different projects so no need to try to work on high availability and traffic distributions. So a load balancer will not solve the problem in my head. The load balancer can be of great help if we have the same data on multiple droplets(servers) and one of the droplets has a problem. We will not face any downtime as the static IP will switch to the other droplet and will give the expected results.

Floating IP is used to move between different droplets (servers) within the same data center. Yes, this might sound like a load balancer but it is not. Here a static IP is assigned to a droplet in your account, with the flexibility to reassign it to a different droplet (server) using the same static IP. Note that moving to a different droplet the IP has changed, but we will still be making use of the static IP.

Now, this case can solve my case. That means, a floating IP is assigned to every droplet (server). In case of any change to a new droplet, projects will continue making use of the static IP. So we can see that with floating IP, projects can be moved to a new droplet(server) without downtime.

Now I got what I needed, and decided to discuss it with my colleague. It sees the possibility of making use of its feature on DigitalOcean, which is free when assigned to a droplet(server).

The question pops up if the IP is banned/blacklisted.

This was the actual problem that pushed us to create a new droplet(server) and had to take time to reconfigure the DNS records for the entire project. This was time-consuming and projects suffered downtime.

Back to point zero, with Floating IP. IF an Ip is blacklisted (static IP) you will need to change it. So at this point, you have to update the DNS records and will suffer a downtime during propagation.

So Load Balancer or Floating IP, will not solve my problem but will be of great help in the case where a droplet(server) fails. That means the static IP is not affected. I will keep looking at a more economical means to handle the situation, while we continue to minimize any risk of an IP ban on our droplets (servers).

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Cheers
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@fombae