Cloudflare

2. Why is my site coming from California?!

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?

Dear User,

Thank you for reaching out about your concerns. I'd like to help you understand this.

If you will check IP Organization Ownership, indeed you will see Cloudflare with California location (example):

OrgName: Cloudflare, Inc.
OrgId: CLOUD14
Address: 101 Townsend Street
City: San Francisco
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94107
Country: US
RegDate: 2010-07-09
Updated: 2021-07-01

However trully serving is related to client (PC, mobile device, etc.) location and you could check Cloudflare POP server in response headers:

~ curl -I "https://example.com"
HTTP/2 301
[...]
server: cloudflare
cf-ray: 89bef1289c492c23-FRA
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400

Reference: https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/http-request-headers/
Section: #CF-RAY

The CF-ray header (otherwise known as a Ray ID) is a hashed value that encodes information about the data center and the visitor’s request.

Some of locations are avaialble to check on: https://speed.cloudflare.com/locations

"iata": "FRA",
"lat": 50.0264015198,
"lon": 8.543129921,
"cca2": "DE",
"region": "Europe",
"city": "Frankfurt"

Please feel free to contact me if you need any further information.

Best regards,
Szymon Kamiński
Cloudflare Support