They intend for you to handle this by having read slaves (or using replica sets in 1.6). If your master fails, you can manually fail over to a read slave. Rep

They intend for you to handle this by having read slaves (or using replica sets in 1.6). If your master fails, you can manually fail over to a read slave. Replica sets handle this for you automatically. You can also pull a read slave out and do whatever you need to with it, then reconnect and have it catch up. MongoDB is really designed to be run on at least 2 servers.