Cloudflare misidentifies Hetzner IPs as being located in Iran
In this technical retrospective (2024), @doruk101 shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
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HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
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This is not limited to Cloudflare. Google has the same issue and it turns out the IPs were being used by the Iranian hosting companies connected to internet surveillance but they keep moving around. So far we only observed this in Hetzner German DCs, which is consistent with the news about illicit activities by Iranian companies in Germany, two years ago during the last uprising against the Iranian government (the Woman, Life, Freedom movement)
We also wrote about this https://blog.cloud66.com/hetzner-connectivity-issues-due-to-sanction-busting-activities
I'm frequently reminded how thankful I am to live in a country with a strong, positive international reputation. Even ignoring actual quality-of-life stuff associated with where I live - simply not being from a country with a "dodgy" reputation makes many things so much easier.
I don't have to think about blocked websites. Companies accept my payments. Couriers ship to me. With my passport, I walk straight to the front of the fast lane, past the large queue of people who didn't happen to be born somewhere rich, western and politically stable.
I don't take it for granted, and it makes me sad that this distinction exists.
I will describe what we do at IPinfo to avoid such a messup. First of all because we do active measurements and our data is usually less prone to errors like this and when it comes to IP location it is as good as it gets.
We have a support team active 247. Then is the issue of update rollout, when things goes wrong (rarely if ever) we can push data updates immediately. We work with our customers and users and try to push immediate fixes.
But the most important thing in my opinion we do is this comment itself. If things go wrong we will address it before you come to our support team.
Hey OP. On behalf of Cloudflare, we take information accuracy very seriously.
I raised the linked issue internally with the team, and they have reason to suspect this has already been addressed.
That being said, if you (or anyone else here) are still seeing this issue occur, please raise a ticket with our support team (https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/contacting-cloudflare-support/) so we can investigate further.
Thanks :)
I wonder if this is related to something I found when I moved my hosting from DO to Hetzner: https://on-no.net/posts/moving-providers-and-tainted-ips/
TL;DR is that the IP that my new instance was assigned had previously been used as part of an advertising CDN based in Iran. It wouldn't surprise me if this is some game of whack-a-mole between interested parties who are at turns applying and attempting to evade blocks.