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.
Related
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.
I recently launched a fantasy football online game for the English premier league called Myfpl11.com and I want to know what server should I choose if I am expecting 20k visits a day. My visits are going up and I want the site to keep performing smoothly. Please help.
This is probably the wrong area of StackExchange to ask this sort of question. However ...
The first thing you should do is get prepared to scale horizontally instead of vertically. If you keep growing you will soon grow out of any single server that you purchase.
Instead, what you need to do is start looking at ways to modify your website to be able to work over multiple systems. If you're experiencing load issues on the server you currently have, spin up another one of the exact same instance and move the database to that server, so you will then have two -- one dedicated to the database (which will really help it do its job) and one dedicated to serving traffic.
From there look at how you can scale in to multiple web processes, databases and add caching layers.
You can add cloudflare.com as your DNS service which will help you out by better caching your assets, but most importantly they will deliver a technical issues page to your users if your site does fall over at any stage. This is really helpful for saving face, because they will get an actual page with a message instead of a continually loading white-page.
Look at using services like digitalocean.com or linode.com (both very affordable and great staff) where you can easily add/remove resources as you need them.
I have a website, hosted on a shared server.
Through CPANEL, I am provided with a few traffic analysis logs and tools.
None seem to provide what I'm looking for.
For each day, I'd like to see log file with a list of unique visitors.
Under each unique visitor (by IP address), I'd like to see the following information
geographic location (based on IP address)
information to help determine if the visitor was a bot or human
the page URLs they requested (including the exact time of request)
explanation of my application:
I run a forum on my site. I'd like a better understanding of who is visiting, when they visit and how
they navigate through my forum pages (topics, posts etc.)
I would appreciate some direction on how to develop this (a script is probably best)
I would (and do) use Google Analytics as it gives you exactly what you are asking for and a whole lot more (like being able to see live what is happening). It requires you to add some javascript code to the application (which for so many today, plugins are available).
If no plugin is available, see https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008080?hl=en
This approach to your end result will typically be a lot easier than trying to create your own log analyser and installing it on a shared cPanel server.
How can I tell the nationality of a user of my web site based on client ip?
Edit: Like commented, this question have been answered before:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/283016/know-a-good-ip-address-geolocation-service
use the GeoIP databse. there is a free one. there are also a lot of GeoIP webServices you can use.
If you're thinking localization, let the user choose the correct language instead of doing it automatically -- or at least provide an easy way for them to change it and make it sticky via cookies. You can do ok most of the time at guessing using GeoIP, but sometimes you'll get it really wrong. Google sometimes sends my wife to the German version of their web site even though we're in the middle of the US. Using anonymization services (like TOR) will also likely result in guessing errors. Having the option to choose and keeping the choice on the computer will make it a better experience for your users.
Besides the already mentioned GeoIP database, you could also use IP2LOCATION service. It's a paid one but it will also work.
Keep in mind that all these services will give you an estimate of the location but not a very accurate geographic position. I read a networking paper once stating that this is an impossible task to accomplish (give an accurate position of an IP address).
I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).
Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.
It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.
There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!
Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).
The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.
Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...
I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/
It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.
Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).
The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.
DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it
It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.
If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.
To browse from a different IP address:
You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.
Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.
The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.