Does having a server in another country slows down your website? - dns

I have a server in Texas USA (hostgator), my domain (.be) is bought at godaddy and people open my website in Belgium (West-Europe).
Is it better to have a server in Belgium?
The price for the same thing I get with hostgator will be times 3.

It is always better to have your server in Belgium. People accessing your website from Belgium will have low latency accessing your website and they will experience faster loading of your website.

These are the response times of my website at various locations. My website server location is US and my location is India. So, this test proves that if you have server in same location, it will have much higher loading speed as compared to if you have server in some other country.

Related

How to block users accessing site outside of UK?

Searched the web and unable to find a solution. I have an umbraco site using IIS to host on a Windows server. Any ideas on approach to block users accessing site outside the UK? Htaccess approach would be too slow.... thank you in advance!
That's quite hard to do accurately, as you could have someone based in the UK using a European network provider, which means that they might appear to come from say Holland instead of the UK. It's also possible for people to spoof their location fairly easily if they really want to get at your site.
As Lex Li mentions there are plenty of commercial databases and tools for looking up a user's location, but the accuracy of these varies considerably, not to mention the fact that some of them only support IPv4. Any of these options are going to be slow though, as you'll have to check on every request. You also have to make sure you keep the databases up to date.
Another option would be to proxy your site through something like CloudFront or CloudFlare which both support blocking traffic by country.

DNS - Domains - Multiple A records

I'm sorry for maybe stupid question and my English grammar)
I'm software developer and I started my little startup.
Now I have users from USA, Israel, Russian Federation etc...
And I have 1 problem.
Now in Russian Federation started block Amazon IP's because Telegram application.
And now users from Russia cannot see my website and use my mobile app because my API and website use Amazon servers (EC2)
My question is:
If i will run additional server in another hosting provider (in Germany or in Russian )
Can I on DNS level add 1 more A record?
Or how i can to redirect user by country?
For example :
If user A coming from Russia - this request going to Russian server, another to Amazon.
Again - I'm software developer and know nothing about DNS. So sorry if I asked something stupid)
You probably need something more than just DNS records. Such as a load balancing proxy.
Have a look at nginx https://www.nginx.com/ for instance, it could be part of a solution for you.
Redirecting viewers to other site based on country geoip

How to transfer visitors to the servers closes to them and where to place the servers?

I am focusing on providing fast page refreshes for my visitors and I wonder where is the smartest spot to place my servers on?
I understand that the best would be to place a server in every country or even city, but that is of course not doable with my economy. I am thinking of maybe setting up three servers, one in the middle of USA (Kansas?), one in Italy and one in Sweden. What do you think about that? I don't care about Africa since they haven't even got computers so I won't get traffic from there anyway. China, North Korea etc are probably just visiting chinese websites, they barely know english anway...
The next problem is how do I redirect a visitor from Finland to the Swedish server? I don't want the visitor from Finland to be using the USA server or vice versa.
You need a content delivery network.

how can i know in which state a server is located?

i working on a project which compare between load time of websites on different server around the world.
in my project i need to buy a spot for a website in several servers but i don't know in which country the server is actually located.
i found an add-on in firefox called "flagfox" (i'm not related to the program, to check it visit: http://flagfox.net/) which indicate in which country the site is located.
i want to know:
a) how can "flagfox" know in which country the site is located? (in is not by the extention e.g .com .uk)
b) how can i know where in the country itself the site is located, i.e in the u.s.a is not very helpful because the server can be in new-york or in los angeles which are several time zones apart.
c) if i don't know the answer to a, how can i verify that the data from "flagfox" or other software for that matter, is reliable?
thanks
From the Flagfox site:
It works by accessing an internal IP
address location database, basically a
rough map of the physical layout of
the Internet, based on data provided
by Maxmind.
You can get access to the maxmind dataset at http://www.maxmind.com/app/ip-location.
There's a good article about this here, complete with sample code. It references a database that is available here.
The database can also be obtained here.

Difference between Ad company statistics, Google Analytics and Awstats on adult sites

I have this problem. I have web page with adult content and for several past months i had PPC advertisement on it. And I've noticed a big difference between Ad company statistics of my page, Google Analytics data and Awstats data on my server.
For example, Ad company tells me, that i have 10K pageviews per day, Google Analytics tells me, that i have 15K pageviews and on Awstats it's around 13K pageviews. Which system should I trust? Should i write my own (and reinvent a wheel again)? If so, how? :)
The joke is, that i have another web page, with "normal" content (MMORPG fan site) and those numbers are +- equal in all three systems (ad company, GA, Awstats). Do you think it's because it's not adult oriented page?
And final question, that is totally offtopic, do you know about Ad company that pays per impression and don't mind adult sites?
Thanks for the answers!
First, you should make sure not to mix up »hits«, »files«, »visits« and »unique visits«. They all have a different meaning and are sometimes called differently. I recommend you to look up some definitions if you are confused about the terms.
awstats has probably the most correct statistics, because it has access to the access.log from the web server. Unfortunately, a cached site (maybe cached by the browser, a proxy from an ISP or your own caching server) might not produce a hit on the web server. Especially if your site is served with good caching hints which don't enforce a revalidation and you are running your own web cache (e.g. Squid) in front of your site, the number will be considerable lower, because it only measures the work of the web server.
On the other hand, Google Analytics is only able to count requests from users which haven't blocked Google Analytics and have JavaScript enabled (but they will count pages served by a web cache). So, this count can be influenced by the user, but isn't affected by web caches.
The ad-company is probably simply counting the number of requests which they get from your site (probably based on their access.log). So, to get counted there, the add must not be cached and must not be blocked by the user.
So, as you can see, it's not that easy to get a single correct value. But as long as you use the measured values in comparison to those from the previous months, you should get at least a (nearly) correct rate of growth.
And your porn site probably serves a high amount of static content (e.g. images from the disk) and most of the web servers are really good at serving caching hints automatically for static files. Your MMORPG on the other hand, might mostly consist of some dynamic scripts (PHP?) which don't send any caching hints at all and web servers aren't able to determine those caching headers for dynamic content automatically. That's at least my explanation, without knowing your application and server configuration :)

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