How to use Australian name servers?

Hi, I have noticed that even with the Pro plan my name servers are still expected to be pointed to quentin.ns.cloudflare.com etc. Usually, these are slow for me. How do I get Australian name servers, are they even a thing in Cloudflare?

Not that I am aware of, NameServers are globally and Cloudflare’s according to benchmarks are one of the very fastest. Can you substanciate “Usually, these are slow for me” a little and provide it with data?

  • how did you test it?
  • what exactly means slow? (define in ms please)
  • you sure it is not related to anything outside of Cloudflare?

I’ve never actually done a “proper” test, but when I didn’t have the Pro plan (using the same name servers though) there was a very noticeable lag compared to my inside network IP. Yes, I know that naturally anything outside of your immediate network is slower than inside your network but websites hosted in Australia generally load as fast as if they were in my network (sometimes it’s slower).

I went to my website that is not hosted on the Pro plan, just the free plan. I’d say it took around 10 seconds to fully load the login page. I am doing a speed test on it now through the Cloudflare dashboard but it’s still loading after I started the test one minute ago.

Maybe it could be that the website is redirecting to an IP inside my network?

The speed test has finished and on the development mode the page completely loads in 12.95 seconds and in normal mode it completely loads a bit longer than that (the exact time doesn’t extend all the way).

But what does this have to do with NameServers? They are just responsible for resolving the DNS - a very small portion of what influences website speed.

Please run GTmetrix tests in developer mode and without. (for without developer mode please run several times, so we know cache was hit)

Then provide us with the links to the benchmarks here.

I assumed that “ns” meant North America or somewhere like that, and I didn’t think that would help the speed.

I’m not sure if I’m in developer mode or not, but I will run a couple of tests and send some links when they are done!

NS = NameServer(s)
and the names before them (quentin for example) are just random names. They all are working the very same worldwide. Yes Pro-Plans do have a lot of benefits and really are a good bang for the buck. But AFAIK they do not influence DNS performance.

So, I’ve run one test and the other is on it’s way. On the first test it gave an error saying it took longer than 2 minutes to load, but I think that’s because there’s a login page.

I’d prefer not to send the link since then it exposes my domain and would make it easier for brute force attacks etc. See the attached image for the results on both tests.

Ah alright, that makes sense.

I thought I saw somewhere saying that there were Australian name servers a year ago (I think) but maybe they changed it or it was never a thing to begin with.

Alright, are you able to share the domain? I will then perform some test with a autralian VPN exit.

Alright, I was just hesitant since it would expose the domain for brute force attacks etc but I was going to change the domain anyway.

The domain is solninjaa.com.au

Thanks, now I understand, you forward this to your home-automation. Also the tests probably failed due to the redirects.

A quick check revealed this: DNS Performance - Compare the speed and uptime of enterprise and commercial DNS services | DNSPerf

Worst DNS resolvetime down-under was 15ms, the other two were 3ms & 4ms. So no problem with the NS at all :slight_smile:
Yes the website is not fast, but that is because Cloudflare can just forward requests when they have been answered by your server/NAS whatever at home. Could be this connection is not very stable, or not fast, or currently under load. I can’t say much about it, but I don’t see anything wrong here.

Ah, ok, that’s strange since for me it takes a while to load :thinking:. There’s also only two things running on my server at the moment so I can’t think of a reason why it would be struggling. Regardless, thanks for your help!

Well, then let’s debug it. Please open the dev console and tell us the value of the cf-ray header.

Alright, let’s do that. I opened the inspector and clicked console but cf-ray was not defined. Did you mean a different tab / window?

Hm, the connection seems to be much faster now, even though I changed nothing.

You need to click on the “network” tab in the dev tools and then click on the main request that took so long, then inspect the header.

Alright, I’ll try that :+1:

So, I had to login to my other account since Cloudflare stopped me from replying for 24 hours.

The value: 7454d229ddaa6beb-SIN

Just letting you know tested from perth au, loaded almost instantly for me on aussie bb.

Just my experience, it did redirect and load a login page with maybe 2 to 3 seconds total.

Often local users are better then vpn tests and using speed tests, just thought i wouldd let you know what it was like from my end.

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