Playing with Geographical Load Balancing

I’ve got a few hosting accounts knocking around almost unused from an old mirror project I was doing with ec.je then oh.mg back in the day.

I had a think about it today, well mainly since I got the invoice from my provider in South Africa. I did a little search for geographical dns, most of them are pretty expensive, with the exception of cloudns which is fairly well priced.

I gave it a try and it was actually pretty quick to get setup on the om.gay domain (the www subdomain mainly). I carved up the continents with the ones in south and east Asia going to the host in Australia, Africa and the Middle East going to the South African host, Europe to the Norwegian host, and the Americas to Dreamhost in the US.

It works out for me as I really wanted to use the Norwegian host a bit more, the only problem they have is not being rather easy to use with SSL certs (no Let’s Encrypt). It was a good thing that I have one for om.gay which each host has installed so it’s pretty seamless.

Right now the content is the same, but now for certain zones it’s speeding through rather than having to connect to a server in the US. Australia is the biggest winner at 2ms ping time vs the 102ms previously (although I have like 6 visitors from there).

It has been a rather fun thing to play with on a Wednesday night.

On my home connection the NS servers haven’t changed yet, so I’ve had to do tests via VPNs to make sure all is good.