Website access from different countries

[rkstevens]

Is there a way that I am able to check a visitor's IP address, and based on the country that the visitor is from display different variations of a page? I have a site that is visited frequently by both Canadians and Americans. I have some content that is relevant only to Canadian visitors, plus then I can have only either the amazon.com or amazon.ca links for products, and not both.
Or would it just be better to have the user choose and set a cookie indicating their country (US/Canada)?

Thanks,
Ron

[hostBrain]

Personally, I always hate being forced to see a page.
What if a canadian visitor goes to your site, with the intention of sending a gift to a friend in the US?

If you did want to go the auto-redirect route, you'd have to acquire a database of ip addresses, then write a script to detect, then route the visitors.
But even in this case, it's not 100%

[DaveSawers]

It's not hard to do and there are services out there you can use to do the lookup, but...

Many Canadians who live away from the big cities use a satellite internet provider. The main supplier has their ground station near Washington DC. Consequently a look up of the IP address gets the country wrong.

So it's only an initial guess on your part.