US/UK Problem

[Raymond]

Hello Members,

I run a web shop and my customers are roughly divided 60% in US and 40% in UK.

Right now i am having a server in Dallas DC.

However i am thinking to have a UK based server as i would like to speed up load times for my UK customers.

The problem i seem to have is that even though i have two websites...shop.com and shop.co.uk, they both read/write to the same mysql database.

I heard that if i move shop.co.uk php files to UK, the website loading time would actually increase as having the php files here and the sql files in the states is a very bad idea... Just need to confirm whether this is true or not.

i don’t want to have two separate databases as i have pretty good number of products and the time it would take copying back and forwards just won’t work for me.

Can anyone give me a solution on this? I did consider sql clusters some months ago (when i thought about this last time) but i think back then i thought they were not going to help me... Can’t remember what the problem with them was!!

Any help greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

[SeanyG]

You can read/write to one MySQL database. Initially you will need the IP address of the server using the MySQL database. On the remote server, in config file replace "localhost" with the IP address.

This works fine for me.

[jazzy639]

The OP is right, it will be slower having a UK server query the US server for each database call.

[paul]

Assuming you've big database I would suggest you before shifting the shop.co.uk website to UK, you should tune and optimize your Mysql Database that will help you to improve the loading time of your web pages. Indeed shifting to UK server is good idea because it will also help you to improve your ranking in UK local results SEOwise.

[Raymond]

Recognize that is it possible to read/write to database on different server. But i am told that having php here (uk) and sql there (us) is slower than having both php and sql there.

[Franklin]

Recognize that is it possible to read/write to database on different server. But i am told that having php here (uk) and sql there (us) is slower than having both php and sql there.

Actually, It will depends on how well written the code is and how many queries are needed to generate the page, but no, in general it will be quicker.

[Super-Blogger]

Are you operating your database and web nodes without replication, security or optimization in geographically diverse location?

You will need to consider (at this early stage):
Sort out a secure tunnel between your sites.
Create a copy of the database to the secondary site.
Modify the administration and front-end sql updates and put them into both sites.
Setup rsync between the two web nodes for web data.
Modify all sql selects to use the local database (with optional failover off-site).

If you are not keeping your UK customers particularly on the .co.uk then you'll need to look at geo location on either the code or dns level.

cdn for images and other media could also be an option.

Everything depends on how far you want to take it. Obviously you will need the web node local to take proper advantage of localized search results.

[Franklin]

Modify the administration and front-end sql updates and put them into both sites.
Setup rsync between the two web nodes for web data.
Modify all sql selects to use the local database (with optional failover off-site).

Why? You can simply use NDBCluster. If you are not doing too much of writes you could even set up a master/master replication system.

[shane]

I think you should go ahead and setup Global Load-balancers and use GeoIP method which will automatically route your UK customers to your UK-based website and your US customers to US-based website which will make it much easier for them to access as per their geographical locations.