IP addresses, countries and search engine spiders.

[Silverbug]

I have a potential client who has a bunch of sites. Some are .co.uk, some are .com and some are .co.nz he wanted to know if the .co.uk ones could have uk ip addresses the .nz one have new zealand addresses and the .com site have us ip's but still host all three sites on the same server (or in this case at vortech)

Is there anyway of doing this at all? Maybe something with the dns if he was able to get the uk and nz ip's so that they pointed to the us server. The thing is (especially with .uk) a site that has a uk ip will get into google.co.uk alot (and were talking months here) faster than a .uk site thats hosted in the us (or elsewhere)

If im not making sense let me know and i'll try to re-explain it

[keidsjedo]

Hey, Silverbug. That is quite a scenario. I hope you find a good solution for this.

Because of routing issues, I'm not sure you could do it with anything simple. You will probably still need a host that is located in uk and nz. From those hosts, however, you could do an internal proxy rewrite (apache mod_rewrite) or something similar to redirect requests to the Vortech servers. That way the actual websites could still be completely managed through Vortech and the search engines will still see the uk/nz IPs.

Maybe, as you suggested, there is some creative DNS entries that you could use. But I can't think of anything that would "mask" the IP address.

Good luck!

[Silverbug]

you could do an internal proxy rewrite (apache mod_rewrite) or something similar

Yeah thats sounds like what i want to do. Will have to investigate more.

[Silverbug]

Because of routing issues, I'm not sure you could do it with anything simple. You will probably still need a host that is located in uk and nz. From those hosts, however, you could do an internal proxy rewrite (apache mod_rewrite) or something similar to redirect requests to the Vortech servers. That way the actual websites could still be completely managed through Vortech and the search engines will still see the uk/nz IPs.

actually do you have any idea where i should start with this? I have very little experience with most things *nix

Also i just want to see if i understand this correctly,
A user would go to the uk ip (site) which would then mod_redirect them the vortech server right. Now is that content actually being sent back to the uk server and then to the user or directly from the vortech server to the user?

[dpyers]

Pages would be served directly from VorTech to the User. I'm not sure if this is going to resolve your google problem. I'm pretty sure you won't want to do a 301 redirect, but what code, if any, you'd want to use, I don't know.

[Silverbug]

ok thanks for that.

[keidsjedo]

You do not want to do a redirect. You want to do a rewrite. With a redirect, you'll get a 301/302 response as dpyers mentioned. But if you go with a rewrite and use the proxy flag, the client is redirected via an internal proxy and will receive a 200 OK response. That means a spider, for example, will not know it was redirected.

Here's a simple one line htaccess example. This .htaccess would reside on the uk or nz server:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.vortechdomain.com/$1 [P]

All this says is to look for the files on the vortechdomain. So if you went to http://yourdomain.co.uk/file.html, the uk web server would silently (internal proxy) deliver http://www.vortechdomain.com/file.html. Does that help? Try it on a *nix account here first to see how that works for you.

If you want to view the response codes and other headers, you could use something like SamSpade for Windows (freeware).

[Silverbug]

ah yeah thats what i want (i still have to check i can get it working) but thanks for that.

[mfennell]

if you are having to set it up on another host anyways why would you bother pointing it to vortech?

I don't see the point of paying double, just to the manage content here. DNS and everything else will point to the other IP addresses that will be redirected here, so if they have issues the site will be down regardless of where the files are stored at.

[dpyers]

Originally Posted by mfennell

I don't see the point of paying double, just to the manage content here.

Kind of depends upon what services are available for what cost on the other host. You can find some unix hosts for $2-3/month and even some free ones, with .htaccess capability. A full set of services for a sophisticated site could be considerably more.

[Silverbug]

Yeah thats exactly what im going to start looking for. Also this is for a client who's very fussy about this stuff, and it was his idea to start with. I personally wouldnt bother about it all, but hey the customers always right...arnt they?

Of course the customer is right. He will be right again, just differently, after you set it up for him and he decides that he doesn't want to burden himself and his visitors with a second SPF, proxying overhead delays, and transpacific latency.

[Silverbug]

haha yeah i have a feeling that might be the case too
(spf?)

Single Point of Failure.