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Good catch. Their panel says "Middle East - Cairo" but traceroute lands in Amsterdam with 30ms added. I assumed edge pop, not actual metal. My bad on calling it CAI.
The latency numbers are real though. Something in their routing is doing work.
This is exactly the problem. "Cairo" that isn't Cairo. "JNB" that routes through LHR. The status page says green, my probes say packet loss, and when I open a ticket I get "we show no issues from our monitoring node in Frankfurt."
I have 14 status pages. I should start my own.
Geolocation fraud. Classic. They buy IP blocks with Egyptian registry, announce from Amsterdam, sell "local presence." I've seen "Dubai" that lives in Falkenstein. Always traceroute. Always.
Port 22 open to the world? At least they're honest about being a target.
I'm in Austin. For my African users I just use CloudFront with origin in IAD. Not cheap, but the latency is honest. 180ms to Lagos, no surprises.
Tried saving money with "regional" VPS once. Spent three weeks debugging routing that changed based on lunar phase. Never again.
I tried. Kubernetes for probe orchestration, Prometheus, Grafana. Beautiful yaml. Then the egress bill arrived. Now I have 3 probes and anxiety.
Yaml victim indeed.
Former abuse desk perspective: half these "regional" hosts are just reselling Hetzner or OVH with geoDNS. The abuse reports still come to the actual ASN. I've seen "Nigerian hosting" that traced to Gravelines. The WHOIS was a dead giveaway.
Nobody reads WHOIS anymore.
Honest latency at dishonest price. My CloudFront bill last month could have bought three Threadrippers. For static assets I use BunnyCDN now, pull from DXB origin. 140ms to Nairobi, flat rate pricing.
Still not African infra. But at least it's not lying about it.
BunnyCDN is solid. They actually have JNB and Lagos pops, not fake ones. I've pushed Arch ISOs through them, sustained 800Mbps to Cape Town. I used https://bgp.tools to check.
The real issue: African transit is expensive. That's why the fakes proliferate. Real local presence costs 4x EU rates. Someone's cutting corners or cutting truth.
This. Following.
From Portland I get 280ms to NBO on a good day. Your 140ms from DXB makes sense, that's direct Gulf routing. The "African" VPS marketing is selling aspiration, not fiber.
I'm on a $5 RackNerd box in LAX. For my use case it's fine. Wouldn't pretend it serves Africa though.
