Hosting a website in multiple countries

apache-2.2domain-name-systemhostingwebsite

Our website is currently hosted in the UK and we have very good search engine positioning on www.google.co.uk. In order to achieve the same sort of success in the US, our site would have to be hosted in the US.

I have a few queries regarding this.

1) how do I set up DNS so that US traffic knows to go to the closer server?

2) Our site doesn't experience a huge amount of load yet, so for the time being, would the US server just reverse-proxy the requests to our UK server?

3) Or would we set up some sort of script which synchronises the databases on both servers?

Best Answer

  1. DNS based on Geolocation

    • You can run bind and patch it with GeoDNS to return a different IP depending on the requester's location.

    • The alternative to running the DNS yourself is to use a provider that will let you specify the IP based on the location of the user. For example: GeoScaling

  2. Reverse Proxying

    • You can reverse proxy it. It may be slower though.

  3. Database

    • Synchronization of your database depends on the type of application you are hosting.
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