Point of presence (PoP)
A point of presence is a physical data center where a CDN terminates user connections and serves cached content — the "edge" in edge caching. Cloudflare operates 300+ (they say "colos"), CloudFront 600+, Fastly fewer but larger ones. Users are routed to a nearby PoP via anycast or DNS, which is what makes a CDN fast: the round trip shrinks from continents to kilometers.
The detail everyone underestimates: PoPs cache independently
A PoP is not a window into one global cache — with almost every CDN, each PoP maintains its own. Content cached in Frankfurt does nothing for a visitor hitting Sydney. The practical consequences:
- Your hit ratio is a per-PoP distribution, not one number. A URL can be permanently hot in Vienna and permanently cold in Tokyo — we measured two orders of magnitude difference in miss rates between colos for identical URLs and TTLs.
- Checking from your desk samples one PoP out of hundreds. Use a multi-location cache checker to see the others.
- Low-traffic PoPs evict earlier — remote locations, where a miss also costs the longest origin round trip, keep your cache coldest. The far edge hurts twice.
More PoPs ≠ better caching
Marketing pages count PoPs; caches care about traffic per PoP. The more locations a CDN spreads your audience across, the fewer requests each PoP sees per URL — and the harder it is for organic traffic to keep long-tail content warm everywhere. Tiered caching and origin shields soften this by giving edge misses a second cache layer; warming from many regions attacks it directly by filling each PoP's cache instead of waiting for a visitor to do it. Browse all Cloudflare locations in our data-center directory.