* mcgehrin@reverse.net (Matthew McGehrin) [Fri 13 Aug 2004, 16:46 CEST]:
1. It's a financial issue. In the event of an emergency or an server failure, how many hours can you financially be offline. Are your customers willing to wait up to 2 days for their DNS caches to update with the new IP address?
In the event of a server failure I suggest you add its IP address as an alias to a non-deceased host. You kept backups of your master zone files on another machine, didn't you?
A very busy domain might benefit from having a higher TTL value for their nameserver's but having a lower TTL for hosts, so that you minimize your downtime, in the event of a server failure. For example, when Akamai was having DNS issues, content providers with low TTL's were able to switch to secondary nameservers faster, than zones with using a higher TTL.
Assuming you're talking about a specific incident not too long ago: To me it looked more like those who had actually spent thought on what to do in the case of a large, longer Akamai failure had less impact when that failure occurred. -- Niels.