Solution for Redirect to website according to country

Redirecting to Geographically Distributed Servers

Description:

We have numerous mirrors of our website and want to redirect people to the one that is located in the country where they are located.

Solution:

Looking at the hostname of the requesting client, we determine which country they are coming from. If we can't do a lookup on their IP address, we fall back to a default server.

We'll use a RewriteMap directive to build a list of servers that we wish to use.

HostnameLookups on
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    multiplex         "txt:/path/to/map.mirrors"
RewriteCond   "%{REMOTE_HOST}"  "([a-z]+)$" [NC]
RewriteRule   "^/(.*)$"  "${multiplex:%1|http://www.example.com/}$1"  [R,L]

## map.mirrors -- Multiplexing Map

de http://www.example.de/
uk http://www.example.uk/
com http://www.example.com/
##EOF##

Discussion

This ruleset relies on HostNameLookups being set on, which can be a significant performance hit.

The RewriteCond directive captures the last portion of the hostname of the requesting client - the country code - and the following RewriteRule uses that value to look up the appropriate mirror host in the map file.