I am 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?
Hey [Customer Name],
Thanks for reaching out! I am Jane from the Cloudflare Support team, and I am glad to assist you with this case.
Based on your description, it seems you've observed that a Cloudflare server in California is being used to serve your website in London, and you're wondering whether this behavior is expected. Is itcorrect?
Cloudflare uses Anycast technology, which allows any of its servers located in over 330 cities worldwide to respond to DNS queries. While responses typically come from the server geographically closest to the user, Anycast routes DNS queries through the most optimized path based on real-time network conditions. As a result, any server within the Cloudflare network may respond to a DNS query, depending on availability and performance at that moment.
In your case, due to Anycast routing, it is expected that a server in California handled the DNS resolution for your website.
If you'd like to learn more about how Anycast works, please refer to the following article: