Question

Figure out which droplet is being used

Hi all,

I’ve been working with a developer on reinstating a backup of my website. I have five droplets spinning. I know this is a total newbie question, but how do I figure out which droplet is pointing to my www.mywebsite.com?

I tried googling my website’s IP address using the following site to figure it out, but none of the ip addresses matched what was returned from site24x7.com/find-ip-address-of-web-site.html.

Any direction to understand what droplet is being used to house my current website would be appreciated. Thank you!


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Accepted Answer

Okay, I talked to my developer and this is what he said. Floating IPs!

Response: The IP is different because it’s using a Floating IP. Floating IP’s are flexible IP addresses that can be instantly swapped to other droplets.

So when the site goes down, you sometimes have to boot up a new droplet and point the domain to another droplet. The DNS takes several hours to propagate, and during that time your site is completely inaccessible. Floating IP’s mitigate that because you can switch to a different machine, and the IP that normal traffic uses to get to your site doesn’t change, so no downtime! It’s like those switches on railroad tracks that change the trains from track to track without everything blowing up.

They are free to use, and extremely nice to have. Next time you move to a new droplet, you can spend as much time as needed setting the new one up, and switch whenever you want without the site going down :)

I have to A Record Types - One says @ and the other says old. I also have a cname that matches my website address.

One of them (@) matches the IP that I got from my terminal ping, but isn’t listed in my droplet list. The other (old) matches one of my droplets listed, but doesn’t match my ping.

Thoughts?

This could be due to ping disabled for example.

You can verify DNS settings to get IP of right one. If you are using DigitalOcean DNS management, login into Control Panel, go to Networking and select your domain from list (click on it). It should have A record that contains IP address of your Droplet. If you are not using this, login to domain management of your domain register and see can you find A record.

Basically in very last resort you can stop apache/nginx on Droplet or power down Droplet one by one until you find which one hosts your site

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