Hostng / DNS location and good response times

Sorry, this is not exactly on programming topic but didn't find any better category for this.

I need to make a multilingual website (think portal), which should be equally available from US/Canada, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia. Which hosting option should I choose:
1. Hosting in NL with image copying to DCs in USA, Eastern Europe and Russia
2. Separate websites in each of four areas with data synchronization between them.

The website is full of dynamic content, so there's no way of using CDN's other than for images only, which can be done without CDN service providers.

May be anyone knows how networks like facebook, linkedin etc operate?

Another question is what DNS server to use. Does it's location matter at all? Would DNS server in Europe slow down website's response times for USA visitors?

Thank you guys for any input

Hi BloodyNinja,

Services like facebook and linkedin have datacenters spread all over the world.
The DNS would not make much difference, usually the browsers cache the IP and use it for a long time.

It seems like you have a big project,
If you plan to go BIG I would recommend you ask for help on a IaaS provider, they will help to configure the ideal setup for your needs.
I highly recommend Softlayer, they have datacenters in North America, Europe and Asia, they also have a great customer support IMO.

Separate instances of your app per DC. Then you 'll set up your DNS in that way so that an EU user gets served by the EU datacenter etc. You 'll need to implement data sync between the DCs but if you do it properly depending on the actual use case, it won't be an issue.

k0d3r said:

Hi BloodyNinja,

Services like facebook and linkedin have datacenters spread all over the world.
The DNS would not make much difference, usually the browsers cache the IP and use it for a long time.

It seems like you have a big project,
If you plan to go BIG I would recommend you ask for help on a IaaS provider, they will help to configure the ideal setup for your needs.
I highly recommend Softlayer, they have datacenters in North America, Europe and Asia, they also have a great customer support IMO.

Click to expand...

Thanks, this seems to be a good idea. I'll try contacting these guys.

jazzc said:

Separate instances of your app per DC. Then you 'll set up your DNS in that way so that an EU user gets served by the EU datacenter etc. You 'll need to implement data sync between the DCs but if you do it properly depending on the actual use case, it won't be an issue.

Click to expand...

okay, at least now I know this is possible.
Filesync should be easy to do but I am a bit concerned about proper DB sync, when there are thousands of DB queries per second. Will try to google that further.

BloodyNinja said:

I am a bit concerned about proper DB sync, when there are thousands of DB queries per second. Will try to google that further.

Click to expand...

Read requests or write requests? For read requests a (write)master-(read)slaves set up will be adequate. Write scaling is harder. If your application doesn't really need ACID, an asynchronous master-master set up will work fine.