Customer Query: I'm in London, but looking at your IPs it shows that you are serving my website from California. Can that be right? Why is that? I thought you were supposed to serve my website from some places close to me?
Hi there,
Thanks for your message! I understand your concern about your website appearing to be served from California, even though you're accessing it from London.
This behavior is actually expected and is due to the way Cloudflare's Anycast network works. Here's a quick breakdown:
Cloudflare uses Anycast IP addresses, which means the same IP address is advertised from all of our data centers globally, including in both London and California. So, when IP lookup tools or traceroutes show a U.S. location like California, they're typically showing where the IP range is registered, not where the traffic is being served from.
Your traffic is routed to the nearest Cloudflare data center, which for you in London, would be our London data center. So, rest assured, you're not taking a transatlantic detour to load your site!
If you're curious and want to verify this yourself, you can look at the CF-RAY ID in your browser's developer tools (in the response headers). Each Ray ID includes a unique code that identifies which Cloudflare data center served the request.
Here's a helpful link that explains Anycast in more detail:
🔗 What is an Anycast Network?
Let me know if you'd like help checking the Ray ID or have any other questions - happy to dig in further.
Best regards,
Aviv
Cloudflare Support
This is a common misconception about how Cloudflare's network operates. The customer is likely using IP lookup tools that show the registration location of the IP address rather than the actual physical location serving the content.
I would use the following tools to help explain this concept:
My approach is to educate the customer about Anycast networking while reassuring them that their site is indeed being served from a nearby data center. The explanation is technical but presented in an accessible way.