Possible to rollout website regionally?

The word you need to search on is "geolocation"; e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1671 … ebsite-php">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/167106/how-do-i-limit-which-countries-can-view-my-website-php

MaxMind are a big name in this area

Worth noting is that IP-based geolocation is not at all accurate under many common cases. Here's five IP geolocation results within a few miles of each other:

My work computer: Florida

Tim Hortons WiFi near my office: Vancouver, BC, Canada

My cellphone: Detroit, Michigan

My home desktop computer, left-most monitor: Rochester, New York

My home desktop computer, right-most monitor: New York City, New York

Most accurate is using HTML5 Geolocation to ask the user's device to disclose its location. However, the user must give their consent before their location will be provided, and if they're using a device without GPS, it's going to be a crapshoot anyway (probably falling back to IP-based geolocation).

In short, there's no correlation between where a user is and where their IP address suggests they are, or even any guarantee that an IP address will only emit traffic originating from one geographic area. (Consider NASA's firewall… it's got a space station full of people and an entire planet inhabited solely by IP-enabled robots behind it, not to mention zillions of employees everywhere from Antarctica to Ohio. Headquarters is Washington, DC, so that's probably where their Internet bill goes. Choose that.) Your plan is not an uncommon one, but it is not possible given the Internet's design.

Great feedback worth thinking about. Hard to believe there is no easy way to accomplish this accurately. Just shows how young the internet still is. Thanks.

Do a "by invitation only" roll out - put up a web site, collect names, emails, and zip codes, then give access to the people in the state you want to start first. It's not 100% accurate, but way better then geolocation via IP.

@mgaccess:

Just shows how young the internet still is.

It isn't really a design requirement, and it would require a lot of tradeoffs for very little benefit (do you still have a landline phone, listed in the phone book?). The closest we'll probably get is something like HTML5 geolocation, where the user's equipment is able to tell the server its location. For 99.9% of situations, it makes no difference whatsoever where a user is physically. (Sometimes it does… but that problem is not unique to IP.)

(Note that distributed services like OpenDNS, CloudFlare, etc., optimize for shortest network distance, which is not necessarily physical distance. Despite Toronto, Ashburn, and New York City being closer physically, Chicago is closest network-wise for me, so that's the OpenDNS location I end up using. Routing me to Toronto would be silly.