Is there a way to select datacenter countries?

[designkrunchstudio]

I have a website for which the server location is Europe UK. The website purpose is to target people in UK only. But since cloudfare anycast system works in a manner where fastest datacenter is picked up it fetches Canada and US as the location. So my pages get ranking in US and not in UK, probably because of the same reason. Now maybe I would want to target more countries in future, I would like to rank there as well. So can I choose/assign what 4 locations my data center should be?

[soldier_21]

@designkrunchstudio

it fetches Canada and US as the location

What makes you think this? Are you sure you’re not confusing it with Geolocation?

Why does my site return a US IP address?

If your site is proxied through Cloudflare, then a lookup on your domain will return one of their IP addresses. The Cloudflare IP will likely show as being in the US, however, this does not mean your traffic will be routed to the US. Cloudflare utilises an anycast network so your traffic will likely go to a server nearer to you (depending on your ISP’s peering). You can determine which Cloudflare data center your requests are going to by adding /cdn-cgi/trace to the domain name. E.g. go to exa…

If you want to see the colocation your requests hit for a URL you can navigate to

https://your-site.com/cdn-cgi/trace

[designkrunchstudio]

@Why does my site return a US IP address?

E.g. go to example.com/cdn-cgi/trace in your browser (replacing example.com with your domain name. You will then see colo=ABC with ABC being the airport code of the nearest major international airport to the data center.

Hey thanks a lot for this, gave me some clarity.

So I do see the COLO:VIE which is a colocation code for nearest data center in Netherlands.

What I still don’t understand (conceptually) why does https://check-host.net/ip-info this website show my IP location and Geolocation as US

[soldier_21]

@designkrunchstudio

What I still don’t understand (conceptually) why does https://check-host.net/ip-info this website show my IP location and Geolocation as US

That is all explained here Why does my site return a US IP address?

[designkrunchstudio]

Thanks.
Understood, the traffic will be routed to a server nearer to my geo-location, for example for India it goes to colo:BOM i.e. Mumbai and for Netherlands it goes to colo:VIE i.e. Austria, where BOM and VIE indicates airport codes of respective cities, where datacenter is located.

Now since my IPs are proxied by cloudfare, in order to hide my original server IP, it is showing US IP address.

What if I remove the proxied status to DNS only, what impact will it have on my website?