A significant portion of my users in Spain temporarily lose access to my website during football matches. Spanish ISPs appear to block IP ranges associated with CDN providers after court orders aimed at stopping illegal streams, and shared Cloudflare ranges seem to be affected along with unrelated sites. I'm looking for a reliable Cloudflare alternative or another architecture that reduces the chance of these blocks. Has anyone had success with providers such as BunnyCDN or Fastly, dedicated IPs, or routing Spanish users through a separate origin?
3 Answers
I moved a site to BunnyCDN and haven’t seen DNS blocking in Spain for several months. It’s worth considering, but I wouldn’t treat it as guaranteed protection—the current IP ranges simply may not be targeted. Check the bandwidth and request-based pricing carefully, and keep a fallback origin available.
The blocks target IP ranges, not necessarily Cloudflare as a brand. Shared CDN ranges can catch many unrelated websites when they are blocked during matches. Switching to BunnyCDN or Fastly may help temporarily, but any provider can eventually have an affected range. A dedicated IP, a dedicated CDN allocation, or a separate origin outside the shared ranges is more durable. There is no guaranteed provider while these court-ordered blocks remain a moving target.
One practical setup is to keep the CDN for most visitors but use geo-aware DNS to send Spanish traffic to a separate origin with its own IP. You could also use a hosting provider that offers dedicated addresses, then run the CDN in DNS-only mode for that route. Test the arrangement on match days, since blocked ranges and enforcement can change.
That’s the important distinction: changing CDN providers only helps if the new IP range avoids the blocklist. It isn’t a permanent immunity.