Can you use rules to stop your site being served by Cloudflare CDNs in certain locations?
I have a client who would like to prevent their website being served from servers located in certain places, which are reasonably popular places to host CDN datacenters.
Rather than look for a CDN with a matching network, I was hoping this was possible using CF rules. I get the impression it ought to be from the documentation, but I'm way over my head and really have no idea.
Can anyone please tell me whether or not this can be done? And, if possible, how one might do this or where they might learn how.
I'm sorry if this is way out of left field or inappropriate. It's my first time here. I'm looking for what I think is a fairly straightforward answer to a simple quesion, but can't find anything anywhere..
4 Replies
I mean you could block requests from specific countries based on GeoIP, or with Enterprise you can use regional services: https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/region-support/ but even regional services at the end of the day receive the request in the closest location and just forward it encrypted to the region you specify. CF is anycast, so all traffic is just going to go to the closest routable location
I hadn't thought of that. It would be a decent workaround if there are no rules-based solutions for excluding locations from caching yourcontent. But it would be easier at that point just to find a CDN that serves only from the locations they've approved.
If you had the requirement of "I only ever want to even get routed to Datacenters in x countries/locations", then yea you'd need to either go super Enterprise with Cf and I imagine they would invent a way if you were big enough, or go with a provider that uses GeoDNS rather then Anycast and thus could way more easily make specific locations routable or not
Thanks Chaika. That's super helpful. I believe their concerns are about possible future political friction, so borders matter.
Maybe I'll go look for some GeoDNS providers and see what they have to say.
Thanks!