Yesterday I set up really fast server which is located in DX1 data center in Dubai for my visitors from the Middle East. The server is responding really quick without the Cloudflare. Then I added it to my Cloudflare Load Balancer with Dynamic Traffic Steering set up and waited for the results. Boom. 90% of the traffic from United Emirates is still re-routed to Hong-Kong, Tokyo, Paris, London and goes to my another server in Germany, rather than going to Dubai CF Edge Server and then to my Dubai server.
From time to time, my Dubai Remote Desktop which is located in another datacenter gets connected to my Dubai Server through Cloudflare and get around 140ms first response in Chrome, however most of the time it connects to European server with around 250-300ms response.
Business Plan is on and traffic is Proxied through CF.
Cloudflare uses an anycast network. Users connect, generally to the data center closest to them not the origin. A user from HK won’t connect to a Pop in UAE nor will a user in London. For cached content they get a much faster response because they connect to a pop closer to them.
Unfortunately Cloudflare’s DXB PoP is not a major one. On the business plan, it looks like AS5384 (Etisalat?) gets routed to CDG, AMS, HKG, and LHR. AS15802 seems to always be connected to DXB on the Business plan.
If you really need to get your customers connected to DXB, then you would probably have to discuss it with Cloudflare sales with an Enterprise plan.
Otherwise, it might be better putting your server somewhere in Europe (even though your customers are DXB based)
You could also try activating (and paying for) Cloudflare Argo, but i’m not sure how works with load balancing, etc.
The rest of the visitors get connected through DXB in 100%.
My remote desktop finally connects to DXB or RUH, however when I visit my page a few minutes after last refresh it takes around 10–15 seconds to get first response in Chrome. Next refreshes are totally fine with 120-170 response time.
