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I own a GPS vehicle tracking device company. The GPS devices are installed on the vehicles and it can be tracked anywhere in the world. All the GPS device has one server IP in them for tracking the vehicle. The server is hosted in Amazon cloud. I'm planning to host the server locally in my office. I have a query in hosting it locally,

Can I share my single public IP with two ISPs in case any one ISP goes down?

vignesh
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    You will need to have provider-independent addressing from your RIR. Unfortunately, the RIRs are out of IPv4 addresses to assign, so you would need to get this from the public IPv4 marketplace. Also, you must come to terms with the ISPs to have them advertise your address block, and the ISPs will not route any IPv4 prefix longer than `/24`. This is actually a simple matter with IPv6 because the RIRs have plenty of provider-independent IPv6 address blocks to assign. – Ron Maupin Jun 07 '17 at 15:29

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You should have thought about this before you sold any device to any user. It's not guaranteed that you could keep the same IP address forever, even with the same ISP. Devices should have at least the option of updating the IP address remotely, and hopefully you can do this on a firmware update or alike.

The best option would have been, as already proposed here, to use a DNS name instead of an IP address. It would have allowed load balancing, redundancy and many other possibilities for extension. If it's possible through an automated firmware update, do so on your next update.

I don't know how many you have already sold but still: if it isn't, make it possible. We do know they already must have internet connection. Provide a cup of coffee during someone does the first firmware update manually, allowing future updates to be obtained remotely. Or don't and just wait while your competitors does this and takes your customers. Getting this right is part of your core business.

Esa Jokinen
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Without going down the route of setting up your own ISP and using BGP, no. Why can't you use a DNS record instead?

cduffin
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  • The GPS devices which are already sold to customers have IP in it. I can't go back and change the IP or URL on all devices to use DNS record.I'm just exploring possible options before I make the change. – vignesh Jun 07 '17 at 11:54
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Can you use a URL instead of IP?

One solution could be to associate a URL through DNS with one or more IP address, and attach that URL instead of the IP.

Cory Knutson
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Juanjo
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  • The GPS devices which are already sold to customers have IP in it. I can't go back and change the IP or URL on all devices to use DNS record.I'm just exploring possible options before I make the change – vignesh Jun 07 '17 at 11:55
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    Sorry, if the ip address is hard-coded you have no options, you are bound to the ISP who owns that ip address. – Sander Steffann Jun 07 '17 at 15:18
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Amazon route53 will allow you to failover a hostname to a backup IP address should the health checks on the primary fail. Can also load balance

user158798
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No, you can't just take an IP from one ISP and use it with another. And you can't have ISPs share them.

The only viable way I can think of: Use your current Server as a gateway that just routes packets to your local server. That way the IP doesn't change and switching ISPs won't matter.

Gerald Schneider
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Hard-coding an IP in a device is a very bad idea.

For the future, you need to set up your devices to look for a DNS domain name, and send their requests there. IPs can not be redirected from ISP to ISP. However, DNS records can.

George
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