My websites are being served from a server in Mumbai, India. But when a user in Pakistan requests a web-resource hosted in India, traffic is first routed to Singapore and then to India (and same path backwards) despite that there are submarine cables directly connecting Mumbai and Karachi. Apparently, there’s an undefined security policy restricting Pakistani ASNs to directly connect to Indian ASNs.

So, had I deployed my server in Singapore instead of Mumbai, it would load (slightly) faster even though Mumbai is geographically closer because it wouldn’t have to cover the extra journey to Mumbai. But the actual fooling thing is that the server location with lowest latency from Pakistan is actually Dubai, and it probably would have been even if we had direct submarine connection with Mumbai (though things would be different if the terrestrial connection with India across Lahore is established).

I guess I’ll have to set up a server in Dubai now¹ 😭

Quoting this legendary reply:

1. Also, I heard Caddy is even faster than NGINX. Maybe, I should experiment with that. ↩︎