I currently have one web server in the Netherlands and I have a windows server in the United States(Dallas).
I’d like to setup the the server in Dallas as a CDN for American and Asian visitors so the site loads a bit faster for them but I can only find tutorials on how to do this with Linux servers while my servers run on windows server 2012(with apache, php and mysql)
Does anyone know how to accomplish this with a Windows server?
Note: I know a professional CDN with world wide locations would be better but I currently don’t want to spend any money on this.
Are you doing it just for the learning exercise? Otherwise you could use Cloudflare just as a CDN and it’s free (though you’ll need a different domain for the assets you want to run through the CDN if you don’t want to move your site’s DNS over).
You should be able to do it with mod_proxy on the Windows server (assuming you can’t install any other software) but you’d still have to do all of the work to route the correct user pools to the appropriate servers (either through DNS which will cost money or by modifying your site code to reference the static assets from a different domain based on the IP address of visitors).
With all that in place, if your server in the US is a shared server then there’s a good chance it will still be slower.
My recommendation is to use an actual CDN - either Cloudflare for free or something like MaxCDN which is still really cheap.