How to Set up a Floating IP on a VPS: Step-by-Step Guide

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When a site's server crashes or has a problem, the site becomes inaccessible to users. In order for the site to stay online in this situation and for users not to encounter problems, we need to be able to quickly transfer the site to another server. If the site's IP is permanently connected to a server, this transfer is difficult and time-consuming, and may cause the site to be down. But a floating IP VPS can solve the problem. But how? Continue reading.

What is a Floating IP?

Floating IPs are public IP addresses that can float between servers within the same network or infrastructure and aren’t locked to a single server. When a server goes down, you can instantly assign the floating IP to another server, so that your visitors don’t experience any inconvenience, as if nothing had happened.

There are some benefits to using floating IPs, such as rapid failover and switching to another server, high availability, which improves user experience, and load balancing that can divide the traffic between various servers. Also, being scalable lets you upgrade and manage resources seamlessly.

Why Use Floating IP on Your VPS?

As we discussed earlier, a floating IP can make your VPS flexible and resilient. You can make it point to a different server if your main server crashes, and make maintenance and upgrading easier, resulting in faster recovery. Floating IPs are also suitable for high-uptime services.  

Floating IPs can have some advantages over static IPs:

Common Use Cases for Floating IPs

Floating IPs can be widely used among different websites and servers: 

• E-commerce: Trust me! No one likes losing customers and sales. By using floating IPs, you can reroute customers to the backup server, so they keep shopping.
• Game servers: If an online multiplayer server experiences hardware issues, you can easily change the servers using a floating IP. So, the players would not have to search for the new address.
• Database Systems: When your primary server fails, it can disrupt business operations. Using floating IPs, you can redirect the queries and prevent this from happening.

Prerequisites Before Setting Up Floating IP

Until now, we have covered what a floating IP does and its advantages over a static IP. Now, let’s see what you require before we dive deep into how you can enable floating IPs. 

• Active VPS server: You need at least one running VPS to assign the floating IP to. For failover or load balancing purposes, you can have more VPS servers.
• Floating IP support: Some VPS hosts may not provide you with floating IPs, so make sure to check the documentation of your provider.
• Administrative access: You need to be able to log in as root or use sudo to run commands.
• Basic networking knowledge: Understanding IP addresses, DNS configurations, and server management will help the process go smoothly.
• Backup server (optional but recommended): For situations where you need to change the server, an additional server might come in handy.

Step-by-step guide to set up a floating IP

After making sure you know about the steps above and have the bare minimum, we will walk you through how floating IP configuration is done. If you follow the step-by-step guide, it should be pretty easy, especially for beginners. 

• Log in to your VPS provider’s dashboard: Sign in to your account and make sure your provider supports floating IPs, then go to the networking or IP management section
• Create a floating IP: There is an option to create or allocate a floating IP. Remember to choose a region that matches your VPS location.
• Assign the floating IP to your VPS: Select the instance from the list and click “assign” or “attach” to bind the floating IP to that server.
• Access your VPS via SSH: Open your terminal and connect to the VPS with ssh username@<your-floating-ip>. Make sure to replace “username” with your VPS user (It’s often “root” or may be a custom user)
• Configure your server to use the floating IP: Sometimes your VPS provider does this automatically, but just in case, you may need to add the floating IP to your network interface using ip addr add <floating-ip>/32 dev eth0 and save the configuration. 

After completing these steps, you might also need to change your VPS IP for security, privacy, or technical reasons. Check out our How to Change VPS IP guide to learn exactly how to do it in a few simple steps.

Testing and troubleshooting 

Finally, we are at the last stage, and it’s time to test it and ensure it’s working properly. We will also check some common problems and try to solve them to give you a smooth experience.

Testing

There are some methods you can use for testing it.

• Ping test: run ping <floating-ip>. If it runs without any errors, it means that the IP is reachable.
• SSH access test: connect using ssh username@<floating-ip>. If you can successfully log in, your IP is properly pointing to your VPS.
• Website test: Open your website in a browser using your floating IP and make sure it loads without any errors.

You can also run a failover simulation test, which is optional but usually recommended. In your dashboard, detach the floating IP from the first server and attach it to another server. Then run the ping test, SSH access, and open your website in a browser to see if it works fine.

Troubleshooting Common Floating IP Issues

There are some problems you might encounter while setting up floating IPs: 

• Can’t ping the IP: Check if the floating IP is assigned to the correct VPS and verify firewall rules (allow ICMP, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH).
• SSH connection fails: Don’t worry! Confirm that the SSH service is running on the VPS and the firewall rules allow it on port 22.
• Website not loading: Check if the web server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) is running properly, and if you are using a domain name, make sure the DNS is pointing to the floating IP.

When things go south and disaster strikes, it’s a good practice to make the floating IP automatically switch servers. One thing you can do is write bash or Python scripts that can move the IP from the failing server to a backup one. It interacts with your provider’s API or networking commands. You can also use load balancers with built-in failover and health checks with monitoring tools. 

Conclusion

Floating IPs provide you with many benefits. Whether you own a game server or a shopping site, they can make your life much easier by making it possible to assign your IP to another server for maintenance reasons. 

Want to launch a business site, a gameserver, or a web app? MonoVM provides you with user-friendly and scalable virtual environments while being efficient and trusted. If you care about professional support and affordable services, and want the best VPS for floating IPs, it can be a great choice. 

👉 You can buy a VPS server and start instantly after the payment is confirmed.