How to Build Your Own Anycast Network with Vultr in 9 Steps

Discover how to build your own Anycast network with Vultr in 9 steps. Our Vultr Support team is ready to assist.

How to Build Your Own Anycast Network with Vultr in 9 Steps

An anycast network allows multiple servers to advertise the same IP address from different geographical locations. This routing technique ensures that the closest or most responsive server automatically serves incoming requests. This improves performance and fault tolerance, especially for latency-sensitive or mission-critical applications.

Today, we will break down the step-by-step process to build your own Anycast network using BGP, cloud platforms, and global hosting providers.

Why Anycast?

Serving traffic from a single data center or server region can lead to higher latency, single points of failure, and scalability issues. Anycast solves these by:

• Improving resilience through redundancy
• Minimizing latency by routing users to the nearest server
• Enhancing availability by distributing load across multiple points of presence (PoPs)

To see how Anycast works in real-world hosting platforms like OVH, check out our guide to enabling Anycast on OVH servers.

Build Your Anycast Network in 9 Steps

Step 1. Register with a Regional Internet Registry 

We will begin by registering with a Regional Internet Registry such as ARIN, RIPE NCC, or APNIC. This is needed to get an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and IP address space.

Each RIR has its criteria, but most require:

• A unique routing policy
• Multi-homed setup (peering with multiple providers)
• Justification for resource allocation

Step 2. Acquire a /24 and /48 IP Block

To advertise IP addresses over BGP, we need:

• A /24 block for IPv4
• A /48 block for IPv6

These are the smallest routable subnets on the public internet and are necessary for propagation across global BGP networks.

Step 3. Apply for an Autonomous System Number 

An ASN is a unique identifier that other networks use to route traffic to us. Once we have registered with an RIR and justified our use case, we will receive our ASN.

Step 4. Get Connectivity and Virtual Instances

We need cloud infrastructure or physical servers in multiple regions. Not all providers support BGP peering, so we need to choose carefully. Two popular options are:

• Vultr – an affordable, globally distributed cloud provider with BGP support
• Equinix Metal – bare metal provider with robust network features

You can quickly deploy servers using the Vultr API, which makes infrastructure automation much easier during anycast setup.

Step 5. Configure Your Cloud Platform

Some cloud providers (like Vultr) require us to submit a Letter of Authorization to advertise our IP space. They will then configure BGP on their end and create the necessary entries in the Internet Routing Registry (IRR).

To streamline these tasks, the Vultr CLI tool can help you manage servers, configure network settings, and monitor usage—all from the command line.

If we switch providers, we have to update the IRR records ourselves to avoid downtime.

Step 6. Announce Your /24 & /48 from One PoP

Next, configure BGP on the server using a BGP daemon like BIRD or Quagga. Here’s a simplified BIRD configuration to announce our prefix:

router id 203.0.113.123;

protocol bgp vultr {

local as 123456;

source address 203.0.113.123;

import none;

export all;

multihop 2;

neighbor 169.254.169.254 as 64515;

password "your-bgp-password";

}

protocol static {

route 123.4.567.890/24 via 203.0.113.123;

}

protocol device {

scan time 5;

}

Restart BIRD to establish the BGP peering session and start announcing our IP range.

Step 7. Announce from Multiple PoPs

Repeat the setup process in at least one other geographic region. As each new server starts advertising the same IP block, the global BGP network will direct traffic to the nearest available node, automatically creating an anycast network.

Step 8. Monitor and Fix Routing Issues

We now need to monitor BGP route propagation and connectivity closely. Use tools like:

• BGP Looking Glass servers
• BGP route monitoring platforms
• Traceroute & ping tools

Look out for misconfigurations, asymmetric routing, or blackholes that could disrupt service availability.

If you run into connection issues, such as failure to reach your servers via SSH, see this fix for “Vultr SSH connection refused” errors.

Step 9. Use GeoDNS for Fallback and Control

While Anycast handles most routing decisions, we can add an extra layer of control with GeoDNS. It helps manage region-specific failover scenarios or redirect specific traffic away from overloaded PoPs.

[Need assistance with a different issue? Our team is available 24/7.]

Conclusion

Building an Anycast network with the right setup offers excellent global performance, resilience, and scalability.

In short, our Support Engineers demonstrated how to build your own Anycast network with Vultr.