recommendation logic is misleading for Israeli/Middle East users

[susunoufi]

Hi Supabase team,

I wanted to share feedback after spending a full day debugging latency issues on my production app (Next.js + Supabase, Israeli users).

The problem:
When I created my project, the dashboard suggested "Southeast Asia (Singapore)" as the Recommended region because my account was set to the "Asia-Pacific" general region. I assumed this was correct since Israel is geographically in Asia.

The reality:
After deploying, my TTFB from Israel was ~650ms. Investigation revealed:

• Israel ↔ Singapore RTT: ~150ms (over-the-wire, due to physical cable routing through India/Egypt)
• Israel ↔ Frankfurt RTT: ~60ms (direct undersea cables through the Mediterranean)

Singapore was actually one of the WORST regions I could have picked from Israel, despite being labeled "Recommended."

After migrating to eu-central-1 (Frankfurt), TTFB dropped from 650ms to under 200ms. The same data, the same code — just a region change.

Suggestions:

1. The "Recommended" badge should be based on measured network latency from the user's actual IP, not on rough continental grouping. Israeli IPs should see Frankfurt or Ireland recommended, not Singapore.

2. When a user's IP is detected from a region with non-obvious network topology (Israel, UAE, parts of Eastern Europe), the dashboard could show a brief tooltip: "Your IP suggests Israel — eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) typically offers lower latency than ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) despite being further geographically. Run a latency test at cloudping.info to confirm."

3. Consider integrating a simple in-dashboard latency check on project creation — a one-time ping from the browser to each region. This would replace guesswork with actual data.

Why this matters:
I spent significant time and effort (and ended up paying for Pro just to enable the migration) before realizing the original recommendation was wrong. For solo developers and indie hackers without infra background, this is a real cost — both in time and in user experience until they figure it out.

Thanks for building a great product. This is a small UX gap in an otherwise excellent onboarding flow.

Best,
Susu Noufi