How to point www address to 2 servers depending location?

Question

Our customer has a web server in China that they want to use for their Chinese customers because of speed issues. Their main web server is in Amsterdam. Do you guys have any ideas how best to accomplish this? We tried simply entering 2 different IP addresses in ISPconfig DNS records but that simply randomizes the resultant IP address.

Any better ideas?

Answer 1

You can'd do that on your own; you need some sort of system which intercepts the user requests and directs them to the "nearest" or "better" server. This kind of service is usually offered by big service providers with a geographical infrastructure, which can provide different contents do different regions; see here for more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast

Answer 2

If you put a DNS server in China pointing to your web server in China and a DNS server in Holland pointing to your web server in Holland that will get you most of the way there.

If you want more control, you should investigate Geo DNS service either in a roll your own solution or something from a vendor.

Answer 3

See this question for more answers: How can I force users from USA to go the USA server and visitors from UK to go to the UK server

The "build your own big solution" would be anycast routing. On a smaller scale it is much easier to use a CDN or a DNS service with some kind of latency based routing (link to AWS but others offer similar features).

Answer 4

One fairly common method (I'm thinking of Citrix Netscaler) does this is a concept called Global Server Load Balancing.

Fundamentally, you end up have making your DNS name a CNAME to some (less-friendly) subdomain which is delegated to a special load-balancer which has ways of determining relative proximity. I'll see if I can dig up a link; I must admin I was glossing over that part when I was on the course for that...

Here is it: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/netscaler-traffic-management-10-5-map/netscaler-gslb-gen-wrapper-10-con.html

You would want a 'proximity' configuration type.

Answer 5

What you want here is called split-horizon DNS . At least this is the proper way of doing this. For that to work you have to control the authoritative DNS.