As of 10 July you can specify yourself which AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or Oracle region your server sits in, instead of the network guessing by response time and getting it wrong. A shorter path for traffic, no extra cost, even on the free plan.
- Cloudflare guesses the nearest tiered cache by measuring response time; behind a shared cloud address that measurement lies.
- As of 10 July 2026 a customer can specify their server's region directly, for example aws:us-east-1.
- It works for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Oracle, through the dashboard, API and Terraform, on every plan at no extra cost.
A request from Tokyo hits a server in Singapore. Instead of going straight there, it loops through Chicago and back. It's not a bad configuration. The network is just guessing where the machine sits - and guessing wrong.
Let's not dress it up. This isn't a revolution. It's a fix for something that should have worked from the start. The automation that supposedly knew where your server was, didn't. Instead of making it smarter, they added a field where the human just tells the truth. Sometimes the best solution is to ask the one who knows.
It matters to anyone who keeps their server on a big cloud and runs their site through Cloudflare. Hundreds of milliseconds on a round trip sound small, until they add up to a slow site. And since it's available on the free plan, small teams can use it too. That's not the usual case.