Localising Hosting for an International website

[Tiggerito]

I am working on an international website that gets traffic from diverse parts of the world.

I have noticed that our single hosting in Australia means that people from the USA and the UK are getting large latency issues and slow page load times.

For obvious reasons I want to fix that.

At the moment the website is on a single domain. Some of my other work is involved in creating a domain for each of the main regions serviced. Each will be powered by the same system with localised variations of data.

Any tips or advice on how I can solve this?

[milengo]

A CDN might be one way to go in terms of speeding up content delivery, depending on how big your site is and what you're hosting. Akamai, and Edgecast are 2 of the big ones. Also, definitely get the .co.uk and .com domain names.

Another free alternative would be to set up page caching on your web server if you don't already have it. We run Wordpress for our English and German language sites, and have a page caching plugin which speeds things up quite a bit. Having said that, Australia is the other side of the world compared to the UK so, physical distance between the web server and the user is always going to be an issue. A CDN will put your content closer to the end user.

[Tiggerito]

A CDN is definitely on the list.

One problem I see with them is they can only deal with static content.

A large part of the load time is in waiting for the html file to get returned. This is dynamic so can't be handled by a CDN.

Akamai goes beyond a basic CDN but doesn't tell you much about their platform. It seems you have to tie in with it? J2EE?

Edgecast looks promising as well but just waffles about the benefits and talks nothing about how it works and how you can use it.

Can I take a custom php/mySQL website and just drop it into these systems?

[Tiggerito]

Stan, is a GSLB different to a CDN?

From what I understand, DNS resolution is a one time request then cached, so most of the latency would be in the direct requests for the information.

In this case latency is far greater than the actual load times.