Our agency, based in the UK, host a website for a client based in UAE. Our hosting servers are in London so we set his website up on Cloudflare with the hope that his content will be delivered to him and his customers from a data center much nearer to his customers in Dubai. We hoped this would then help reduce the time his visitors have to wait for the website to load.
When he runs the a trace using https://best.ae/cdn-cgi/trace from Dubai however, the ‘colo’ heading tells us that his content is being delivered from the datacenter in London (“LHR”)! Addtiionally, he is still getting load times of around 13.5 seconds - indicating perhaps that the CDN is not working.
Is that right? I had hoped that his website would be delivered from his nearest data center and his customers would not have to wait 13.5 seconds for the website to load! Have I misunderstood something?
Cloudflare does have a datacentre in Dubai (DXB) however AFAIK not all datacentres are available for all plans. Still, London might be a bit too far, you might want to open a support ticket to have this investigated.
As for the 13.5 seconds though, that is most likely a performance issue on the server itself.
FYI I called Cloudflare to ask them if it was true that not all data centers are available on the Free plan. They reassured me that “all 156 global data centers are available on all plans”.
I’ve messaged customer support with our query and they’ve asked our client to undertake a Traceroute. If the long page load time can not be explained by Cloudflare, we’ll have to ask our developer to have a look.