On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Mike Rathburn <[email protected]> wrote: > This is kind of general in scope, but just want to see if it's possible or > done currently... > > Let's say you have a site that will get traffic from both the US and the UK. > What would be the best method for making sure that a browse request from the > US would pull up the site located at a host in the US, and the same for the > UK browsers and directing that traffic to a host located in the UK? This > would be to avoid the lag time of traffic having to cross the pond.
It sure does happen. Even when you may not want it to. Three years ago I went with my wife to Switzerland where she was working at the time. Typing in www.google.com there got me transferred to www.google.ch. In German no less, although I could see that there were French and Italian choices as well. There might have even been an English choice. Blogger was a complete bitch. It was all in German, and I couldn't find my way (through the German menus) to find out how to get it back into English, the one stab that did allow me to change MY BLOG to English. But not how I could get Blogger to actually work in English, not until I was back state side. But it was incredibly difficult to get to, and I had zero idea that was going to happen, being my first international trip let alone dealing with Google trying (and failing) to deal with me, even though I was using the same computer that I was using in the US, and Google for all the data gathering that they do, SHOULD have noticed this, and at least done a little hand holding for me. When we were in South Africa, at least English was the default, although I had about 12 other languages to pick from as well. Back around 12 years ago when IMDB got started, they had a www.imdb.com that told you to use us.imdb.com or uk.imdb.com, depending on where you were situated at. This was a matter of cost control, not lag control. :) Those still work, but so does www.imdb.com. How do they (google, et al) do it technically? I haven't a clue. I could see using a cookie, it it's not set, then query the IP address (there are multiple sites/databases to choose from), and then point them to the correct site. You might not even need to use a cookie if it's quick enough. -- The meek shall inherit the earth in little 6 by 3 plots -- Robert A. Heinlein (Lazarus Long? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
