IIS need web down webpage

[pointman4]

My company has one external web server that runs a website for our customers. We have IIS and DNS for the site running on the same machine, and I have been asked to come up with a solution so that when that server is down, we have a page that comes up and informs that the site is temporarily down etc... The suggestion that I have received is to have a cold server ready and to come into the office and bring it up manually when the server is down. There has got to be a better solution than this, I just need some suggestions to research. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[disord3r]

By putting the DNS server on the same machine as the Web server, that has created a single point of failure, but to have any sort of reliable redundancy for both systems, you'd need 4 servers (2 or more for web (depending on traffic) and 2 for DNS), so there has to be a compromise somewhere, unless you actually have 4 systems at your disposal.

At the very least you should have 2 web servers running Windows Load Balancing Service or some kind of fail-over system for the web servers. DNS should also be separate from the web servers.