Cloudflare Proxy Issue in Bangladesh: My Painful Experience

#network #proxy #bangladesh #isp

Cloudflare Proxy Nightmare in Bangladesh (Dev Case Study)

For the last two days, I nearly lost my mind working on a client website.

Everything looked fine from my end, but the site was unbearably slow from normal ISP connections in Bangladesh.

Pages took forever to load
Assets crawled
I debugged everything: hosting, database, PHP-FPM, Nginx rules—you name it.

The Twist

When I connected through a VPN, the website was blazing fast.

Smooth, perfect, just how it should be. That’s when the puzzle got ugly.

After hours of testing, breaking and rebuilding parts of the site, I discovered the real culprit:

👉 Cloudflare Proxy Mode

The moment I paused Cloudflare (disabled proxy → DNS only), the site became lightning-fast again—even from normal Bangladeshi IPs.

So What’s Going On?

It looks like Cloudflare’s edge routing/peering inside Bangladesh (and possibly in other countries with weaker infrastructure) is unreliable or congested.

Instead of speeding things up, the proxy nodes were slowing websites down massively.

From abroad or over VPN: fine.
From local ISPs in BD: nightmare.

I literally wasted two days of work, destroyed and rebuilt a client site, doubted my server setup, and pulled my hair out—when all along, it was Cloudflare’s proxy causing the issue.

Where Else Can This Happen?

Countries with unstable or throttled peering agreements
Regions with weak Cloudflare data center presence
ISPs that throttle or misroute Cloudflare IP ranges

How Cloudflare Proxy Works

When you enable proxy (orange cloud):

If your site is fast in DNS-only mode but slow with proxy, the issue is in that first hop.

Main Technical Reasons

Poor Peering: BD ISPs often route Cloudflare traffic via India/Singapore instead of Dhaka → higher latency & packet loss.
Congested PoP: Cloudflare’s Dhaka servers get overloaded at peak hours.
ISP Throttling: Some ISPs traffic-shape Cloudflare ranges, causing slowdowns.
Anycast Oddities: Routing may detour to faraway PoPs (e.g., Chennai, Singapore).
TLS Edge Delay: If BD edge is slow, SSL handshake latency skyrockets.

✅ Key Takeaway

If your site is slow locally but fine on VPN, don’t waste days debugging like me:

Disable Cloudflare proxy (orange → gray cloud)
Test in DNS-only mode
If fixed → the issue isn’t your code, server, or client. It’s Cloudflare edge routing.

I wish I had known this earlier.

Sometimes, the problem isn’t with us developers or the servers we build—it’s the global infrastructure we rely on.