Why is the datacenter for my website Singapore and not Sydney?

Website, Application, Performance
1

What is the name of the domain?

What is the issue you’re encountering

The CF Ray I am seeing for my site while loading in Australia (Sydney) is always Signapore and not the Sydney Datacenter

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

Loading https://groupcards.io/cdn-cgi/trace I get:

fl=998f126
h=groupcards.io
ip=175.32.235.***
ts=1744723593.812
visit_scheme=https
uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
colo=SIN
sliver=none
http=http/3
loc=AU
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=plaintext
warp=off
gateway=off
rbi=off
kex=X25519

But loading https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace or other cloudflare sites I’ve tested it correctly loads from SYD

fl=493f146
h=cloudflare.com
ip=175.32.235.***
ts=1744723412.315
visit_scheme=https
uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
colo=SYD
sliver=none
http=http/3
loc=AU
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=plaintext
warp=off
gateway=off
rbi=off
kex=X25519MLKEM768

Is there something I need to enable to get this to load from Sydney? All resources (js/css etc.) seem to load from SIN and are taking over 1s to load, even with a cache HIT.

It looks like some maintenance in Sydney may have just started, but it’s been a consistent issue for months.

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

Load site in Australia

2

Your site is on a Free plan but cloudflare.com will be an Enterprise plan. You can try a trace to these two domains, sjr.org.uk (Free) and sjr.dev (Ent) to see if the same holds from your location.

Different routing for domains on free plans indicates one of…

  • congestion or maintenance at the Cloudflare PoP requiring lower priority customers to be offloaded
  • your ISP won’t peer, or is demanding excessive payment for traffic generated by Cloudflare free plans, leading to…
  • bad routing by your ISP (either to pressure Cloudflare to pay, to reduce their own transit costs, bad configuration, or other reasons)
3

Thanks for your reply. From my testing it sounds like the peering or routing issue, although I don’t understand much about the subject.

Testing the sjr.org.uk (free) also resulted in SIN but sjr.dev (Ent) resulted in SYD, so it does seem to be a free/enterprise issue.

I then tried testing my NordVPN Sydney connection, and that put everything (even free sites) through SYN and resulted in the resources being loaded in ~80ms vs 1.5s, suggesting it must be ISP (SingTel Optus) related. I would have usually assumed the overhead of a VPN would have slowed things down!

Is there anything else I can do about it, and would upgrading to the Pro plan help, or do I need Enterprise?

4

You can try a Pro plan, you only need to use it for a month to see if it improves it and cancel if it doesn’t. I have no idea if it will, depends on what the routing is for those IPs, or if it will always stay that way. But for $25 if you think it’s worth it, give it a try - no guarantees it will though so up to you.

5

Thanks, yeah I tried it shortly after I sent my reply and it appears to have switched to SYD now. Thanks for your help!

6

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