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)
Helpful breakdown—DNS-only test is a smart first step in BD.
Yes indeed.
Glad you find it helpful :D