Managing an Internet outage

[Mike Diggins]

We occasionally have a situation where our Internet access is completely 
down. My Manager has asked about the viability of locating a DNS server 
off site, and during a situation when we're down, modifying it so that it 
resolves my entire domain to a single IP address. Web users would be 
redirected to that address, and a web page would explain we're off line.

Our DNS TTL is set to 1 hour, however, I'm concerned that sites might 
cache that address for longer than the TTL, and affect things such as mail 
delivery beyond the outage. Does anyone have an opinion on this plan? 
Obviously improving our redundancy is a better solution, and that will 
come in time. Right now this seems like a quick and easy (dirty) solution.

-Mike