Geo serving

Since March 2014 , we are serving content to readers from servers that are as close to them as possible. Currently, we do so from the following locations, simultaneously: Singapore and Hong Kong for Asia, Frankfurt, Falkenstein and London for Europe, Manassas for the US East Coast, San Jose for the US West Coast.

Geographical serving comes included by default in all our current plans and we consider it a standard for nowadays. The Google Bot will surely see excellent results for your site, thus will set a higher crawl rate, meaning more fresh content in the SERPs for your site.

What Geo Serving is good for: very low response times around the globe, meaning reduced times to first byte for readers browsing our customers’ sites. Also, geo serving acts as a default failover mechanism, meaning that in the case of an outage, the rest of the points of presence take over instantly the role of the failed machine.

We are using for this purpose a mix of data-center providers, to stay as safe as possible from global failures that could happen. The geo serving mechanism is built on top of Amazon’s highly available DNS service Route 53, and the server locations are close to Amazon’s regional data-centres. The routing of the site visitors is latency-based. This policy based records alternative for Amazon’s service is called Zinc and it’s an open source project. We tell you all about it on our blog .

FAQ

Does Presslabs offer support for geo location based content caching?

We do have a solution that can work with our caching solution, but it needs a skilled WordPress developer to make it work properly. We return the country from where the request is made into a location.json file returned on root, for example, check: https://www.presslabs.com/location.json. You can use this JSON file to show different content based on countries, by using JavaScript and cookies instead of PHP code (for example, you can show the homepage in different languages).