Website redirect based on location

Website redirect based on location scenario :

• You have many websites targeting for different user countries. For example: vn.domain.com for Vietnamese users, us.domain.com for US users.
• You want to allow your users to browse your website as fast as possible, and you have 1 server in Vietnam, 1 server in US, 1 server in UK. These servers are setup for daily synchronization. Then how to load according servers based on user location?

Solutions:

1. Use PHP (or whatever web programming scripts) to detect IP and do redirection. Can use some free IP2Location DB in the net, such as http://www.ip2location.com OR GeoLite at MaxMin. Problem: This must load the web application tier, and users might experience a delay. To do this:
   • Download MaxMind’s GeoIP.dat database  Free Version (GeoLiteCountry), then download geoip.inc. Upload those two files to the same directory where your page is located.
   • Do redirection in the PHP script as follows

     <?php
     require_once('geoip.inc');
     
     $gi = geoip_open('GeoIP.dat', GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE);
     $country = geoip_country_code_by_addr($gi, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
     geoip_close($gi);
     
     $my_countries = array('us', 'gb', 'vn');
     if (!in_array(strtolower($country), $my_countries))
     {
     header('Location: http://www."ALL"TRAFFICURLGOESHERE.whatever');
     }
     else
     {
     header('Location: http://www."SELECTEDCOUNTRIES"URLGOESHERE.whatever');
     }
     ?>

   • Country code can be found at http://www.maxmind.com/en/iso3166
2. Implement a location-based redirection on web server, so the web application does not need to be loaded. Can use Apache webserver with mod_geoip2 Apache module.
   • More configuration tutorial can be found at the above page.
   • We can also use it in .htaccess file as follows

     GeoIPEnable On
     GeoIPDBFile /path/to/GeoIP.dat
     
     # Start Redirecting countries
     
     # USA
     RewriteEngine on
     RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^US$
     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://us.domain.com$1 [L]
     
     # UK
     RewriteEngine on
     RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^GB$
     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://uk.domain.com$1 [L]