Cloudflare has several [IP address ranges](https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/) which are shared by all proxied hostnames.

Together, these IP addresses form the backbone of our [anycast network](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/anycast-network/), helping distribute traffic amongst various edge network servers.

Note

Cloudflare uses other IP ranges for various products and services, but these addresses will not make connections to your origin.

## Allow Cloudflare IP addresses

All traffic to [proxied DNS records](https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/proxy-status/) passes through Cloudflare before reaching your origin server. This means that your origin server will stop receiving traffic from individual visitor IP addresses and instead receive traffic from [Cloudflare IP addresses](https://www.cloudflare.com/ips), which are shared by all proxied hostnames.

This setup can cause issues if your origin server blocks or rate limits connections from Cloudflare IP addresses. Because all visitor traffic will appear to come from Cloudflare IP addresses, blocking these IPs — even accidentally — will prevent visitor traffic from reaching your application.

In addition, allowing Cloudflare IPs might be needed to avoid rate limiting or blocking these requests at your origin server.

For [Magic Transit](https://developers.cloudflare.com/magic-transit/) customers, Cloudflare routes the traffic instead of proxying it. Once Cloudflare starts advertising your IP prefixes, it will accept IP packets destined for your network, process them, and then output these packets to your origin infrastructure.

## Customize Cloudflare IP addresses

If they do not want to use Cloudflare IP addresses — which are shared by all proxied hostnames — Enterprise customers have two potential alternatives:

* [**Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP)**](https://developers.cloudflare.com/byoip/): Cloudflare announces your IPs (an IP address range you lease/own) in all of our [locations](https://www.cloudflare.com/network/).
* **Static IP addresses**: Cloudflare sets static IP addresses for your domain. For more details, contact your account team.

Business and Enterprise customers can also reduce the number of Cloudflare IPs that their domain shares with other Cloudflare customer domains by [uploading a Custom SSL certificate](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/custom-certificates/).
