Since about 11th September 2019 Cloudflare has been blocking acess to South Africa CDN in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town for everyone not on Cloudflare enterprise.
Is this due to a policy change or is South Africa CDN now only available for enterprise customers.
My ISP has been routing traffic to another location Kigali Rwanda which is the worst location for South African traffic. EU West is better. I’m dealing with them to update the routing but was curious why Cloudflare is blocking CDN traffic in SA for non Enterprise customers?
This is NOT an ISP specific issue as 1.1.1.1 is routed to JHB but mybroadband.co.za is not for the same ISP and from different ISPs I’ve tried.
My ISP say they are aware of the issue and it’s been an issue since 11th September and have sent a query to Cloudflare NOC but feedback or reasons for these blocks are not forth coming…
The latest feedback is that Cloudflare experienced an issue with their Transit Provider feeding the 3 data centres in South Africa Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.
Not ETA but expected rerouting for all plans except Enterprise is a couple of months…
Wow looks like stuck with slow slow website loading if anyone uses Cloudflare. I totally get Cloudflare dropping free taffic but people pay for the other plans and you just make them suffer too with zero explanation.
Now traffic is going to Kigali and that CDN is servery congested. Less than 1Mbps speeds on that CDN. Sigh
Any updates on this yet? My ISP is routing to Kigali and it’s SOOO frustrating. I’ve turned Cloudflare off in the meantime, but hoping this will get fixed soon.
Contacting the ISP won’t really help. Cloudflare has stopped South Africa CDN. Afrihost,Axxess and Webafrica is announcing client prefixes in Kigali. Telkom and Rain announces in Djibouti. Cool Ideas, Websquad, Vox and Cybersmart an announces in London.
The main issue here is the fact that Cloudflare has stopped South African CDN without saying anything. They have kept taking money from clients and acted as of nothing is wrong. Unethical business practice at the very least. At least they can be open and transparent about the issue.
“I have checked with my operation team and I’m afraid that there will not be any immediate progress in at least the next few weeks as they are working on upgrading/expanding the data centers in ZA.
The only option will be to upgrade to the Enterprise plan.”
I have confirmation for 2 ISPs in South Africa that have queried with Cloudflare NOC. Cloudflare has an issue with their transit provider providing transit capacity to South Africa. These issues has been causing 502 errors. Cloud Flare has decided to limit traffic to these affected CDNs in South Africa to Enterprise and 1.1.1.1 only.
Prior to this Cloudflare has been rerouting JNB (JHB) to the smaller quieter CDNs CPT and DUR during peak times to alleviate the traffic at it’s main CDN. I’m assuming that this did not have the desired affect and they have chosen to just stop traffic completely for everyone except Enterprise and 1.1.1.1 to keep those services active at least.
I admit, that might be disappointing but first, they do not guarantee the availability of regional datacentres and second, from their response it seems as if it was a temporary thing and routing will “soon” come back.
I am also from South Africa. I have been caught in two minds about using Cloudflare here.
Please could you help me understand, how does one check whether the CPT, DBN, and JHB CDN servers are actually serving my content?
I pick up from this thread that the problems is that these servers are not functioning currently for Free accounts, and so instead the content is being served from JIB (Jibuti)?
Please could you explain this for me a bit. I would sincerely appreciate it.
I run a website in South Africa, and I have local web hosting, but I decided that Cloudflare and a CDN would help to cater for international visitors. However, my priority is South African visitors.
If the CDN (Cloudflare) is slowing things down for South African users then I am not sure whether it is worth it or not.
Would love some help and I’d appreciate your time and energy.
Your summary is pretty accurate. As long as Cloudflare doesnt route to their local datacentres, your visitors will have international hops.
You have three options
Leave everyhing as is and accept a slightly higher latency for your local users.
Pause Cloudflare and have the domain name resolve to your actual IP address, in which case Cloudflare will be essentially disabled.
Create two distinct hostnames, one for local and one for international visitors and keep the local one unproxied () and the international one proxied ().
However, when I go to my Cloudflare dashboard, it shows is the traffic section that:
" Total Unique Visitors
Last 24 hours
125"
So Cloudflare must be enabled correctly, and at the Home of the Dashboard I have added the website and it says “Active” with a green tick next to it.
Thank you Sandro very much for the helpful reply. I hope you feel good for helping people!
Would you be able to link me to a more comprehensive explanation of this please?
“Create two distinct hostnames, one for local and one for international visitors and keep the local one unproxied () and the international one proxied ().”
This looks like it may be a decent option, but I want to understand it better.
) and the international one proxied (
).