How does status.twitter.com work?

[Jahova]

Hello there. Today I was wondering about twitter's status page. It's on a subdomain from their main domain twitter.com and when the main site (twitter.com) is down, status.twitter.com still remains online and fully functioning.

How does this work? Is the subdomain on a different server or what? How could I manage the same thing? Thanks. Tom.

[MrRem]

Its a subdomain but you update the DNS servers to send people looking for that site to a standalone server.

Its done using nameservers :)

[Jahova]

Ah. I see, so it is with the DNS of the subdomain. I've never actually seen this done before and I'm unsure how I would also do it :(

[Awfy]

It's because the subdomain points to an entirely different IP from what the actual site is on. In the example of status.twitter.com it points to a Tumblr account which means if Tumblr is online then so is status.twitter.com.

It's done using A records in your domain manager, if you try it out using a Tumblr account you'll soon understand how it works. They have a tutorial on how to attach your domain to Tumblr (including subdomains) - http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_domains.

[Jahova]

Thanks ;)