Server in multiple locations

Posted on October 19, 2017

I’m looking for a new solution for speeding up my website response time.

I currently have a VPS hosted by a VPS company in the UK. But I have clients which use my software all the way in Hong Kong. My UK response times are under a second - which is good. While the response times my Hong Kong clients are getting are about 6s, which really adds up and makes things slow.

I saw on digital ocean somewhere you can deploy to multiple locations.

Now what i’m thinking (not sure if possible), but I want to have a solution where I have one server I have to manage, but it actually responds from different locations.

so I manage one server, one database, one set of files etc. But when a user from Hong Kong requests data from my app, it is being requested from a server in/close to Hong Kong. My app has potential to have clients globally, so moving forward I would like to be able to deploy this system globally no matter where you are.

Is this possible with Digital Ocean, and can anyone provide any references I need to take a look at please?

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alastairc

October 21, 2017

Accepted Answer

You’d need to run your application code in both places, one at your current side and one on a second server in Hong Kong. If you’re moving from a one server setup, you’ll might have to make some changes to your application’s code so that you can configure both instances to speak to a common database server (not localhost).

Given that “speaking database” across the internet is generally a bad idea, you’ll want your database and your remote server to share a vpn. (I don’t think DO’s private network options span data centres)