High Azure Bandwidth Fees To Different Cloudflare Region

Website, Application, Performance DNS & Network
1

What is the name of the domain?

What is the issue you’re encountering

High Azure Bandwidth Fees To Different Cloudflare Region

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

Dear all,

We are a non-profit organization using Microsoft Azure, and have been using the free Cloudflare plan for a few years. Our servers are located in Azure’s Southeast Asia (Singapore) region.

In recent months, we are experiencing a significant surge in outgoing bandwidth costs to Australia East region, where all the IPs belong to Cloudflare. Since our servers are in Singapore, we thought Cloudflare would be using their Singapore IPs to access our servers and cache the data, but it appears that a lot of accesses originate from Australia East.

These are the primary Australian IP ranges from them:
172.68.0.0/16
172.69.0.0/16
108.162.0.0/16

When our users (mostly Malaysians) access our domains, it appears that Cloudflare immediately uses the above IPs to connect to our servers to retrieve the live pages. We tried blocking these IP ranges thinking that they are just back-end crawlers and Cloudlfare would simply switch to other geographically closer IPs, but apparently if we block them, end users are completely unable to access our websites and Cloudlfare will show a connection error on the browser.

This has resulted in high outgoing bandwidth cost for us as Azure data transfer rates are high from Singapore to Australia East region. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient funds to bear the high cost surge, as Azure has reduced the non-profit sponsorship grant by over 40% since last year.

Is there a way to configure Cloudflare to not use Australia East region, or prioritize Singapore / Southeast Asia servers for the caching and accessing of our domains?

Thank you for your help.

What feature, service or problem is this related to?

I don’t know

2

Cloudflare IP addresses are anycast so are not tied to any region or location so don’t block any Cloudflare IP addresses or you may get connection issues.

Users will connect to Cloudflare at their nearest PoP to them from which the request to the origin will be made, not the nearest PoP to the origin.

Make sure you are applying as much caching as you can and check you are configured as here…

2 Likes
3

Thank you for your insights and helpful reference article.

Over 90% of our traffic is from Malaysia, and our servers are located at the neighboring country of Singapore. Since the bulk of our bandwidth cost shows “Australia East” where Australia is way further at another continent, is it likely that Azure is incorrectly miscategorizing Cloudflare’s IPs as Australian traffic due to the Anycast system?

We are using Malaysian IPs to access the domains when Cloudflare used “AU East” IPs to initiate the requests. We are about 300km away from Singapore, while Australia is something like 5,000km away.

4

This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.