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Al Amin
Al Amin

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Cloudflare Proxy Issue in Bangladesh: My Painful Experience

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.

Top comments (2)

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dreama profile image
Dream

Helpful breakdown—DNS-only test is a smart first step in BD.

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dev-alamin profile image
Al Amin

Yes indeed.
Glad you find it helpful :D