Co-locating my website ?

[Mangoman20]

My sites are currently located in the US in a shared hosting environment. I am now receiving complaints from people in Dubai/India/Beirut of slow connectivity.

what would you suggest ? change hosts in the US ? What about hosting a secondary server somewhere in India ?

Any help would greatly be appreciated !

 

[MadMailMan]

Why not somewhere in Europe. Germany is cheap.

 

[Mangoman20]

ok, anywhere in europe.. what I need advice on is the possbility of hosting my site in 2 locations.

Is it possible ? if so, what are the companies that can provide me with this service ?

 

[RSkeens]

Hi Mangoman20,

Connectivity between the US and EU is always going to have some latency (anywhere between 100 and 200 ms) - India may also be a little worse, however I've never tested latencies using a server from India.

It's not essential that you locate your hosting geographically to where the majority of your visitors are, but it can sometimes be a good idea.

ok, anywhere in europe.. what I need advice on is the possbility of hosting my site in 2 locations.

Is it possible ? if so, what are the companies that can provide me with this service ?

It is definitely possible to have your site located in two different locations, however the kind of set up for synchronisation of data between the servers is expensive. If both locations share the same domain name TLD (.com, .net, etc), then you're also going to need to pay quite a bit for the routing set up also involved.

Good luck!

 

[MadMailMan]

ok, anywhere in europe.. what I need advice on is the possbility of hosting my site in 2 locations.

Is it possible ? if so, what are the companies that can provide me with this service ?

I believe what you are looking for is DNS load ballancing. Somebody out there please correct me as I have only heard about this. In it's most basic for what is done is your DNS SOA issues either alternate IPs for your www record or applies some sort of formula. ie if the IP requesting the DNS lookup is in a certain range supply one resolution otherwise supply another. Speak to your ISPs DNS guys or have a google for it. You might be able to do it yourself.

 

[Murmaider]

what you are looking for a GEOIP DNS Solution or even just a GEOIP solution to start with. GEOIP is provided by maxmind and it is basically a database of countries and what IP ranges belong to what countries. There are some DNS solutions which can make use of this feature, which would you allow your dns servers to give different responses based on what country the query was coming from.

Or setup subdomains like us.yourdomain.com and eu.yourdomain.com and purchase two servers. Use the perl GEOIP module and when a person goes to www.yourdomain.com, check which country the request is coming from and redirect it accordingly. This is what large companies like HP, Dell, etc do.

 

[Mangoman20]

Cool, thanks guys for the feedback, will be trying out some options.

 

[Praemon]

The previous posts are correct in saying Global DNS Load Balancing is the probably the best route to take. However, it can be expensive and a rather difficult solution to implement. Hardware solutions are expensive but more practical, and software solutions are harder to setup but you can do it yourself using PowerDNS and Geo backend (free): http://micro-gravity.com/wiki/index.php?page=GeoDns .There are draw backs, and this article is a good read: http://www.tenereillo.com/GSLBPageOfShame.htm

The alternative, if you're hosting large files and these are the main problem, is using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Akamai. They are excellent but very expensive. On the other hand, Coral CDN is a freely available and is quite effective: http://www.coralcdn.org/

I've had quite an involved look at trying out these different solutions and the major problem comes in if you are using a dynamic site with a database. Trying to keep these databases in sync can be very difficult especially considering you would be running them all as masters. I've been unable to find an effective solution for this although I've heard Mysql Sandbox could be the solution: https://launchpad.net/mysql-sandbox

If you do go the route of doing it yourself and only require files, it becomes a lot easier and free programs such as rsync http://rsync.samba.org/ will do the job. In essence you could create your own GSLB using open source software on a dedicated server. (PowerDNS + Geo backend and rsync for files)

Hope this helps...