To me it appears that:

• If the resource is load balanced it should be the same regardless of the droplet that serves it.
• If the resource differs between hosts, surely the different versions should be at a different urls.

When you have a load balanced setup it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a “cold standby” just sitting there waiting for the “active” one to fail - You’re paying to have the droplet running, you might as well have each of them serve 1/n of your traffic.

(Obviously It depends heavily on the level of control you have over the code that generates your status. If it’s super expensive to run you might not want to run it at full force on 2 droplets - but maybe it’s not that intensive)

Thanks for your reply. The point is not load balancing, but failover; i.e. having redundancy. In this case a passive node (cold standby) is exactly what’s needed. Some applications are important enough to justify placing them on standby. Note, the backup droplet will continue to receive the same feed as the primary; but not any requests – that is, until the primary fails.