The first server you hit does a geographic lookup of your IP address to get a reasonable estimation of where you are, then redirects you to a CDN server that's

The first server you hit does a geographic lookup of your IP address to get a reasonable estimation of where you are, then redirects you to a CDN server that's closest to you on the network. http://whatismyipaddress.com/ http://whatismyipaddress.com/ shows you where in the world the net thinks your IP address is. There are a bunch of geolocation services out there.