Routing international server traffic

[optrex]

I have an NZ based server with an NZ based audience.

I have an allocation on my server for international traffic. After that allocation has been used up international traffic is charged. In simplistic terms, because of the the growth of my site, once I hit day 25 in any given month, if you visit from another country, I pay for the privilege of your visit. This situation is clearly only going to get worse.

My question is how can I best control the route of this traffic? For instance, jQuery Source - can I handle this locally for NZ viewers and via google for international? Is there anything I can do to reduce the bandwidth being used - for instance I've blocked baidu.

I'd be interested in your thoughts

 

[Chris D]

Your host charges you for international traffic?

Solution: new host. I've not heard of a host doing that before...

As for jQuery source, just serve it from Google for everyone. With Google's distributed DNS and other good stuff, it is probably served from a server near NZ anyway.

 

[MattW]

I can't say I've heard of a host with those sort of traffic restrictions before! As Chris suggested, I'd start looking for a different host.

Failing that, it if you really want to stay with them, ask them to block all non NZ ip addresses to stop them reaching your server. Even if you are blocking them on your servers firewall, they are still going to be using bandwidth trying to get there before being dropped by the server

 

[optrex]

ALL decent NZ hosts charge for international traffic. I know its not a problem elsewhere in the world, but if you want an NZ based server, which I do, then finding another host is not a solution that is available to me. Hence the question.

 

[Dan Cryer]

I'd strongly recommend using CloudFlare. On my site, approx. half of the requests are handled entirely by CloudFlare. It also acts as a CDN, so it'll proxy your JS/CSS/Images so that most requests for them don't go to your server.

As a bonus, you also get HTML/CSS/JS/Image optimisation, bad IP protection, IPv6, globally distributed DNS and a whole bunch of other things.