Has anybody tried www.smartscripts.co.uk? (http://www.smartscripts.co.uk?) seems like a nice idea, but I haven't tried it for myself... i'd appreciate anyone's opinion before i part with any money... ;-)

They seem to be talking about load balancing your sites. This raises a couple of questions:

1) How do they redirect your traffic. Do all your hits have to go through them first, and they redirect to the best responding site?

2) How do they know the best responding site for a user in Washington, when they are testing the sites from the UK.

It looks as if you have to sign up with more that one hosting provider to make use of this (so they can have a meaningful redirect). Therefore, you can probably get away with Round Robin DNS (RRDNS). This is where a host name, eg. www.webhostingtalk.com (http://www.webhostingtalk.com) is resolved to a set of IP addresses. i.e. returns 1.2.3.4 the first time, 1.2.3.5 the next time etc.

Also, you need to be sure of keeping state, and replicating backends if you use this type of system.

Either way, its not worth paying smartscripts to run a fancy RRDNS when you can get it for free.

[This message has been edited by triumph595 (edited 06-26-2000).]