Moin Hamburg! Ensconced alongside the Elbe River, Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, is the second largest city in the country, and the eight largest in the European Union. Our data center in Hamburg is our 4th in Germany following deployments in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Berlin, our 19th in Europe, and 72nd globally. This means not only better performance in Germany, but additional redundancy for our 3 other data centers throughout the country. As of this moment, CloudFlare has a point of presence (PoP) in 8 out of Europe's 10 most populous* cities, and we're headed for a perfect 10-for-10 (look out Budapest...).

For the local audience: Liebe Freunde in Hamburg, Euer Internetanschluss ist schneller geworden und ihr könnt jetzt sicherer surfen. Viel Spaß.

Be sure to have some Glühwein if you visit the Christkindlmärkte this holiday season

Yesterday we announced new points of presence (PoPs) in Montreal and Vancouver. Today: Hamburg. However, the holidays are hardly over, and we have lots more cheer to spread. We've sent planes sleighs full of servers, switches, routers and PDUs to many corners of the globe. And to cap it off, we'll gift some CloudFlare gear to the first person to guess how many data centers we reach by year end, as well as to the person who can guess the next data center (that isn't on the system status page)! Happy guessing...

—Mit freundlichen Grüßen Euer CloudFlare

* By population within city limits.

With the holiday season in full swing, it's only fitting that we continue to spread cheer, joy and a faster Internet around the world. To start the season we begin in Canada with NHL rivals Montreal and Vancouver, our 70th and 71st points of presence (PoPs) globally. Montreal and Vancouver, the 2nd and 3rd largest Canadian metropolitan areas, respectively, join our existing PoP in Canada's largest, Toronto.

Together, CloudFlare's network in Canada is now milliseconds away from the country's 31 million Internet users. As of now, the web sites, mobile apps and APIs of all CloudFlare customers are delivered at a cool 6.1 million times the speed of the fastest slapshot (for the curious, the current NHL speed record belongs to Zdeno Chára of the Boston Bruins, whose slapshot clocked 108.8 miles per hour / 175.1 kilometers per hour).

Canada is not just one of the most wired countries in the world, with nearly 87 per cent of Canadian households connected to the Internet, but also one of the largest as measured by e-commerce transaction volume. According to Statistics Canada, Canadian enterprises sold more than US$100 billion in goods and services over the Internet in 2013, up from US$87 billion a year earlier. Interestingly, the median amount spent on retail e-commerce transactions is substantially higher for Canadian-domiciled web sites (including the Canadian arms of US e-commerce giants) than sites selling into Canada that are domiciled in the US. One significant factor mentioned in this dichotomy is latency.

Latency matters. Almost seven years ago, Amazon published a remarkable statistic: the online retail giant found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Executives from Google and Microsoft presented data demonstrating that even small delays of under half a second impact business metrics. Today, a broker could lose millions in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is even a few milliseconds behind the competition. Of course, if you're a CloudFlare user you needn't worry about this.

Montreal and Vancouver are the first of several new data centers we have planned for this holiday season. While each new site is another step in our quest to conquer latency, be sure to also check out our HTTP/2 demo and our HTTP/2 guide for developers to further optimize your web applications on CloudFlare.

— Happy Holidays from the CloudFlare team

Photo source: Daniel Frauchiger; used under creative commons license

Grüetzi Zürich, our 5th point of presence (PoP) to be announced this week, and 69th globally! Located at the northern tip of Lake Zürich in Switzerland, the city of Zürich, often referred to as "Downtown Switzerland," is the largest city in the country. Following this expansion, traffic from Switzerland's seven million internet users to sites and apps using CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away. Although best known to some for its chocolate and banks, Switzerland is home to many of the most significant developments prefacing the modern internet.

It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web (WWW). Tim laid out his vision to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world in a memo titled, "Information Management: a Proposal". Amusingly, his initial proposal wasn't immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time noted that the proposal was, "vague but exciting" on the cover page.

At least one VC may have said something similar to us once upon a time

The first website at CERN—and in the world—was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer (one of Steve Jobs' early projects). The website described the basic features of the web, how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine—the original web server—is still at CERN to this day. In 2013, as part of the project to restore the first website, CERN reinstated the world's first site to its original address.

Fast forward to 2014, the year we celebrated the Web's 25th birthday, and almost two in five people around the world are on the WWW.

As we noted in a previous post, one of the exciting things about working at CloudFlare is our position at the vanguard of technology and the internet. This includes our efforts to provide universal support to our customers for IPv6 and SPDY, along with our recent announcement of DNSSEC and HTTP/2 support. Moreover, every CloudFlare customer—including our free users—is now issued an SSL certificate at no additional cost to provide a secure browsing experience that includes support for the latest cipher suites and SHA-2 signature algorithms. If you'd like to help keep the web available, secure and fast for everyone, consider joining us.

— The CloudFlare team

Photo by Nick Karvounis / Unsplash

To get the week started it's our distinct pleasure to introduce CloudFlare's latest PoP (point of presence) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Our Copenhagen data center extends the CloudFlare network to 65 PoPs across 34 countries, with 17 in Europe alone. The CloudFlare network, including all of the Internet applications and content of our users, is now delivered with a median latency of under 40ms throughout the entire continent—by comparison, it takes 300-400ms to blink one's eyes!

Danish traffic, previously served from Stockholm and Amsterdam, shifts into Copenhagen

As can be seen above, traffic has already started to reach Copenhagen, with steady increases over the course of the day (all times in UTC). The new site is also already mitigating cyber attacks launched against our customers. The spike in traffic around 08:46 UTC is a modest portion of a globally distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeted at CloudFlare. By distributing the attack across an ever growing footprint of data centers, mitigation is made easy (and our site reliability engineers can sleep soundly!).

In December 2014 we announced our intention to launch one data center per week throughout 2015. It's an ambitious goal, but we're well on our way with over 35 new PoPs announced year-to-date. That leaves 17 to go, and we'd like to make a rather big dent this week. Interim goal: 70 PoPs by the end of the week. That means 5 new sites this week alone, more in a single week than we launched in our entire first year of operation.

What does this mean for you? It means that over the course of the week your web sites, mobile apps and APIs using CloudFlare are going to get quite a bit faster for hundreds of millions of Internet users (there is a hint there). Not yet a user? Consider signing up here.

— The CloudFlare team

Three years and 46 data centers later our expansion returns to the United States. Phoenix, the latest addition to the CloudFlare network, is our 11th point of presence in North America, and the start of our effort to further regionalize traffic across the continent. This means faster page loads and transaction speeds for your sites and applications, as well as for the 6 million Internet users throughout the Southwestern US that use them.

The vast majority of Internet traffic in the US is exchanged in only a small handful of cities: Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, Chicago, Miami, Ashburn (Virginia) and New York. These locations evolved into key interconnection points largely as a result of their status as population and economic centers. However, if you're one of the 236 million Americans that live outside of these metro areas, you have to hike quite a bit further to access your favorite content on the Internet.

To illustrate this, we measured the level of local interconnection between a handful of our Tier 1 Internet providers—NTT, TeliaSonera, Tata Communications and Cogent—in different metro areas. For the uninitiated, Tier 1 networks are the group of networks that connect with one another to form the core backbone of the Internet. In Internet routing jargon, Tier 1s are networks whose routes are not transited by any other network. Rather, each Tier 1 is directly connected (i.e. peered) with every other Tier 1. By looking at a combination of our providers' Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) community tags, some of which include location, we determined the number of routes locally exchanged between each Tier 1 network in a given metro area.

Unsurprisingly, in a densely interconnected area like the San Francisco Bay Area, the level of interconnection is high. For example, we started by measuring the number of routes Japan-based NTT receives globally from its peers by looking at BGP community 2914:420 (the "420" portion of the tag denotes peers only, and 2914 is NTT's autonomous system number). The answer? NTT received 372,244 routes from its peers at the time of measurement. Next we looked at the number of these routes that were also present in the BGP community for NTT's Bay Area nodes (2914:1008). Of the 372,244 routes NTT receives from peers globally, 361,043 (or ~97%) of the routes were seen in the Bay Area. In other words, the vast majority of Tier 1s peered with NTT are able to reach NTT locally in the Bay Area. This is a key component in what is referred to as "hot potato routing."

Taking the same measurements for Tata and Cogent in the Bay Area resulted in a similar degree of traffic localization (96% and 97%, respectively). The faster the potato (i.e., Internet traffic) is tossed, the hotter (i.e., better) is the performance of the Internet. You'll never look at a hot potato in the same way again.

We took the same set of measurements in Phoenix, only this time for Cogent (AS174). Despite a local presence, and despite the presence of other Tier 1s—Tata and TeliaSonera—in Phoenix, the number of peer routes seen by Cogent was 0 (zilch!). Of course, this isn't unique to Cogent, but all Tier 1s in the metro. This means that if you're in the Southwest, your traffic likely must be hauled to another point of interconnection (e.g. Los Angeles or the Bay Area) where it can be exchanged with the other networks that make up the Internet. The same is true for almost every metro area outside of the small handful previously mentioned.

Not content with this result, it became clear that we either needed to convince the large (mountainous?) networks to connect locally, or to bring the mountain of content that resides behind the CloudFlare network to the local audience as we've now done in Phoenix. And who doesn't like moving mountains? (Hint: these people do, and you can join them). While Phoenix is but a start in this effort, you'll continue to see CloudFlare expand both wide, into new geographies, and deep within existing geos. Both are fundamental to help build a better Internet.

— The CloudFlare team

Photo source: Andy B; images used under creative commons license.

Our new point of presence in Manchester, UK brings the CloudFlare network to 63 points of presence across 33 countries. In other words, the sun never sets across the CloudFlare network. Our data center in Manchester also admits the United Kingdom into a small club of countries with more than one CloudFlare data center, including the US, China, Japan, Australia, Germany, and France.

As of yesterday, traffic from the majority of Internet users in Northern England is now mere milliseconds away. More importantly, our Manchester and London data centers allow for redundancy and content localization within the UK for all of our customers.

The city of Manchester has made more than its fair share of technical contributions over the years. It is the city where Rolls met Royce (their first car drove off the line of their Manchester factory in 1904), and is also home to the first modern computer. The computer, nicknamed "Baby", was built at The University of Manchester using technology developed for WWII communications equipment, and ran the world's first stored program at 11am on Monday 21st June, 1948.

It is fitting, then, that in the last three years there has been a concerted effort to turn Manchester into a second hub for Internet traffic outside of London. We are proud to join this effort, and announce that we are the latest members of IX Manchester, a rapidly growing peering exchange serving the North of England. IX Manchester marks the 11th peering exchange we've turned up in just the past 3 months (to learn more about peering read our post here).

What does this mean for you? If you are a CloudFlare customer, it means that your web site is faster (your content is served closer to your visitors), safer (another facility to mitigate attacks), and always online (yet another redundant data center to serve your traffic). Best of all, you don't have to do anything! The benefits are free, automatic, and constantly growing. If you'd like to help us build a better web for everyone, consider signing up here.

— The CloudFlare team

The past few years have been marked by tremendous growth for CloudFlare. At the time of our last fundraising in December 2012, CloudFlare was a team of 37 operating a network in 23 cities and 15 countries—today we number over 200 with a presence in 62 cities and 33 countries. We’ve grown from delivering 85 billion page views per month for 500 thousand customers to nearly 1 trillion each month across 4 million Internet properties, all the while protecting our customers from hundreds of billions of cyber threats. The growth and resonance of our service since CloudFlare’s founding 5 years ago is beyond our wildest of expectations, but it is only in the coming years that our scale and efforts to build a better Internet will become visible.

In 2016 alone we will more than double our global presence, increase the size of our network by an order of magnitude, and with that allow millions of new businesses and online publishers to accelerate and secure their online applications and harness the growing power of the Internet economy. Our service is built on the simple premise that any individual or business should be able to quickly and easily ensure the global performance and availability of their websites and mobile apps, and withstand withering and sophisticated cyber attacks—all without a single piece of hardware, or the need to build a global network and the team of engineers to manage it all.

To sustain this level of growth requires investment. In this pursuit we’re pleased to announce that we have raised $110 million from Fidelity, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and our existing investors. Beyond the additional capital raised, the broad, strategic participation in the round from many of the world’s leading technology firms validates the opportunity ahead of us, and positions us for the next chapter of our growth.

But before we write this new chapter, a bit about how we got here.

Seismic shifts are the sorts of groundbreaking developments that fundamentally alter the ways in which organizations and industries operate. We came upon a few such shifts as CloudFlare was founded in 2009. Although these shifts were already well underway, their strength has increased logarithmically each year.

These shifts are the massive movement of commerce and communication online, and the rapidly evolving means by which organizations deploy applications, increasingly in the cloud. Had one started a business in 2009, their first call might very well have been to Dell or HP to purchase servers (ours was to HP!), followed by calls to Oracle and Microsoft for the databases and software necessary to deliver the applications across the final tier of Internet hierarchy, the network edge. It is in this last tier that companies like Cisco capitalized on the last seismic shift at the network edge—the need to process and manage an explosion of network traffic directed towards the applications, and storage and compute platforms beneath.

Excerpt from our fundraising presentation titled "Scalability and elasticity of the cloud will prevail"

Today it is almost inconceivable that an upstart business would purchase a single piece of hardware, much less call anyone to procure it. In less time, with less cost, and more elasticity, an organization can turn up any number of storage and compute instances on cloud based platforms. The on-premise, perpetual license-based software and databases of yesteryear are now also available as services. Even complex applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) systems are now largely dominated by software as a service (SaaS) offerings. CloudFlare is now pioneering this same shift at the network edge. In other words, it’s time to say farewell to hardware appliances.

The network edge can be broadly described as the “control plane” for all traffic directed to the layers below. This control plane ensures that traffic to the layers below consistently reaches its destination, that authorized users receive appropriate access, and that hackers are kept at bay. Each of these appliances (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, DDoS mitigation appliances, WAN optimizers, malware scanners, authentication devices, among many others) look for patterns in traffic, apply stored rules against the patterns, and make network I/O decisions to block, re-route, and compress, among many other functions. Now, CloudFlare is able to perform each of these functions without a single piece of customer hardware, and across a global network with immensely greater scale and elasticity, and a small fraction of the latency and cost.

Excerpt from our fundraising presentation titled "The network edge now expands beyond the data center"

This shift at the network edge is further driven by its expansion, as well as the blurring of its perimeter (security jargon for the line delineating assets to be protected). This expansion is occurring across multiple vectors. Organizations now deploy their applications across multiple geographies to reduce latency, across disparate physical and cloud environments for redundancy and elasticity, and adopt third party SaaS applications to replace internal business systems. What used to be solved by hardware appliances is now far better solved by cloud services.

CloudFlare is the new control plane for the network edge. With a simple DNS change, traffic to an organization’s applications and store and compute environment are directed through CloudFlare’s global network no matter where they reside geographically, logically or virtually. With one of the largest edge networks globally, we can perform each of the aforementioned edge functions to accelerate, secure and ensure the availability of the applications behind us with blazing fast speed, absolute elasticity and an enormous return on investment compared to hardware based solutions.

This is our vision, and one that is now shared with many of the world’s leading technology firms (and investors). Each of Fidelity, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and Google are uniquely positioned to support CloudFlare’s evolution in a rapidly evolving environment, and address key questions. What is our mobile strategy? What is our China strategy? How are we going to succeed with large enterprises? Will other giants partner or compete with you? How does CloudFlare become a public company?

Our choice of investors should hopefully provide some insight into our answers to each of these questions. Moreover, each of the participants in our round agreed to invest in the company without any special control provisions, board representation, economic treatment or even information rights. It was important for us as a company to continue to execute against our vision without distraction.

We don’t precisely know, but if the past is any indicator, it may continue to be beyond our expectations. In a fun bit of CloudFlare history, we unearthed an e-mail between two of CloudFlare’s founders from May 2009.

What might have sounded delusional to many five years ago (and they probably would have been right at the time), is a reality today. Five years later, and built upon the contributions of a talented team, our steadfast customers, and an unparalleled group of investors, we are well on the path to building something big and unique.

We’re always looking for feedback. You asked for an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, and we delivered. Encryption and SSL certificates? Now free, and included with all plans. A larger network to serve your global visitor base? We’re 62 deep, and not stopping. This feedback has helped tremendously over the past 5 years, so please keep it coming as we tackle the next five.

We’re looking for new team members. Great people who are passionate about building a better Internet, and willing to tackle big problems. We are building a service that allows anyone to run a website or mobile app as fast and secure as the Internet giants, improving the surfing experience for over 2 billion Internet users, and empowering millions of businesses to securely transact online each day. If that sounds interesting, check out our job postings here.

Thanks for your support over the past five years.

—The CloudFlare team

Photo source: Jorge Láscar; images used under creative commons license.

Kuala Lumpur joins the CloudFlare network as our 45th global point of presence (PoP). While this latest deployment comes only a day after the announcement of our expansion in Berlin (back-to-back!), it's been a long three years since we last crossed a new border in Asia. Kuala Lumpur expands our presence in the Asia-Pacific region to nine PoPs: Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

One of the difficulties of delivering content locally in certain parts of Asia (and in many other parts of the world for that matter) is that certain ISPs only connect with other ISPs in the same local Internet ecosystem outside of their national borders. In the absence of domestic interconnection, a request (e.g. an e-mail or web request) from one local ISP to another "boomerangs" outside of the national border before it is ultimately delivered to another local ISP. If you live or travel in certain parts of Asia, this is one of the leading culprits for why the web feels slow. The lack of a domestic and central interconnection point also makes it challenging for networks like CloudFlare, both technically and economically, to deliver the international content of our users both locally and ubiquitously.

A blast from the past

Fortunately, in 2006, the government of Malaysia announced an initiative to form the first neutral Internet exchange point (IXP), MyIX, to facilitate and promote the local interconnection of ISPs. CloudFlare, as the latest member of MyIX, can now deliver the content of our 2.5 million+ users both centrally and locally. The result is significantly better load times and application performance for the 20 million Internet users in Malaysia and our customers. It is also great to see that the neutral IXP model is rapidly gaining traction among governments, policy makers and civil society throughout the world.

Today: what happens in Malaysia, stays in Malaysia

CloudFlare's goal is to help build a better web for everyone. With each new data center we get closer to building a network that will allow us to achieve that goal. While it may have taken us three years to cross a new border in Asia, it may just be a few days before we enter into another! Stay tuned because there's a lot more to come...

—The CloudFlare team

Our data center in Berlin is our 3rd in Germany following Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, 14th in Europe, and 44th globally. Berlin is of considerable importance not just because it is the capital of Europe's most populous country, but also because it is the 2nd largest city in the European Union by population* trailing only London. As of this moment, CloudFlare has a point of presence (PoP) in 7 out of Europe's 10 most populous cities, and we're headed for a perfect 10-for-10.

"I am one with the people of Berlin," best expresses our sentiments following this latest launch, but is more famously a reference to U.S. President John F. Kennedy's June 26th, 1963 speech in West Berlin (and also the source of an amusing urban legend). The story goes that Kennedy should have said "Ich bin Berliner" ("I am a citizen of Berlin"), but instead remarked "Ich bin ein Berliner" which translates as "I am a jelly doughnut."

The Berliner: we treated ourselves to one a few in celebration of the launch

As it turns out, and despite decades of misinformation, Kennedy was linguistically correct. While in proper German an actual Berliner would say "Ich bin Berliner, " that wouldn't have been the right phrase for Kennedy to use as a non-resident. The addition of the indefinite article "ein" is required to express a metaphorical identification between subject and predicate. That being said, in any other context, it is indeed a way to say "I am a jelly doughnut."

Speaking on behalf of the entire team here at CloudFlare, we can empathize. Every new PoP we turn-up involves thousands of details and a fair share of "lost in translation" moments. Over the course of the following months we plan to launch a series of technical blog posts on how we rapidly deploy (and manage) an increasingly large and complex global infrastructure footprint.

In our Düsseldorf post we referenced the wave of imminent new CloudFlare datacenters to come over the remainder of the year. We've already added 14 new PoPs year to date, and we're not even half-way done. Stay tuned...

—Mit freundlichen Grüßen Ihr CloudFlare

* By population within city limits.Photo source: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra; images used under creative commons license.

Photo source: AMS-IX

Only two weeks after the announcement of our four new points of presence (PoPs) in the Middle East, it is with much hullabaloo that we announce our 43rd PoP, and second in Africa following Johannesburg, in Mombasa, Kenya (a.k.a. “The Castle”). In a challenge that vexed many of our readers, Mombasa is our first PoP to be located in a real life castle-turned-data center (see above). From this castle CloudFlare is already serving networks in every country across East Africa, with reach to many of the region's 30 million+ Internet users.

While today it feels as if Internet access is ubiquitous, this is most certainly not the case everywhere. The continent of Africa was connected relatively late to the Internet and, in the first years, access was limited to a small segment of the population due to lackluster investment and growth in underlying Infrastructure, and high access costs. Most Africans were also without access to broadband Internet, and were largely limited to viewing content created and hosted half a world away—for the same reason there was little access, there was also no local hosting industry to speak of. By now, if you’ve followed our blog, you know that locating content and applications far away from users is a recipe for latency (i.e. the Internet in slow motion). With CloudFlare, your content and applications are automatically served from the closest PoP in our global network directly to your users.

Fortunately, over the past several years, Africa in general, and East Africa in particular, has seen tremendous growth in the underlying Internet Infrastructure including the arrival of many submarine cable systems. International Internet bandwidth in the region has multiplied twenty-fold in the past 5 years alone. At the same time, an increasing number of Africans now have access to the Internet, reaching a milestone of 20% Internet penetration, a level that is considered the minimum to enable a country to get significant economic benefit from an Internet economy. This is something we’re fortunate to witness (and facilitate) first hand. Entrepreneurs throughout Africa, many of whom are CloudFlare customers, are beginning to seize on the opportunities afforded by Internet access.

To build on this growing momentum, and to continue to foster the development of the African Internet ecosystem, we’re pleased to announce our first deployment in East Africa. Prior to now, traffic to CloudFlare customers from East African countries was largely served from our London and Amsterdam data centers with round trip latency of 150-350ms or, in some cases, with better latency from our data center in South Africa. As of now, our Mombasa site is serving traffic to networks in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and even Mauritius (among many others).

CloudFlare's new home in the SEACOM cable landing station in Mombasa, Kenya (Photo Source: AMS-IX)

As the latency measurements demonstrate below (note: all measurements represent round trip time to the closest CloudFlare PoP in milliseconds), in Uganda, latency has decreased from as high as 150ms to the closest CloudFlare PoP to 20ms, a 7.5x improvement.

The same can be seen in Tanzania where latency has decreased from 150ms to just under 15ms (another 7.5x improvement!).

Source: Measurements from RIPE Atlas

Even though access costs (i.e. the cost of Internet bandwidth) remain extremely high across Africa, we continue to work with local partners to expand and amplify these benefits throughout the continent. If you are an Internet operator that would like to bring the benefits of CloudFlare to your network—whether in Africa or globally—or are simply curious about how this network expansion can help your organization, get in touch with our team.

—The CloudFlare team

Our last embarkation into a new geography coincided with a significant milestone: our 30th data center (and first in Africa) in Johannesburg, South Africa. And as we march past number 40, we’re proud to announce yet another. Introducing CloudFlare’s latest points of presence (PoPs) in Doha, Qatar; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Kuwait City, Kuwait; and Muscat, Oman. These data centers are the first wave in our MENA (Middle East/North Africa) expansion, and the 39th, 40th, 41st and 42nd data centers, respectively, to join our global network.

Up to this point all CloudFlare traffic delivered to the MENA region was served from our London, Frankfurt, Marseille, Paris and/or Singapore data centers, with round trip latency of up to 200-350ms. As in Africa, local bandwidth in MENA is notoriously expensive making it cost prohibitive to deliver content locally. That is (once again), until now! We're proud to announce the first of a series of agreements with regional carriers including Etisalat, Omantel, Ooredoo, and Zain to help build a better Internet in the region.

A few of the necessary ingredients to build a better Internet include international connectivity (often in the form of submarine cable systems) that connect to national backbones which, in turn, deliver the Internet to the access networks that bridge the last mile to Internet users themselves—all of which must be in place and optimally utilized to meet increasing demand in the most cost effective way. Fortunately, in the MENA region, there is already good international connectivity, with the vast majority of Internet traffic transferred internationally through submarine cables (something we referenced in our Marseille blog post), and substantial investments already made into national backbones and last mile infrastructure (e.g. broadband and mobile networks) to the end user.

All MENA countries are connected with at least two submarine cables; the UAE alone has 15+!

The problem is that the international submarine cables built in the region were designed to link individual countries in MENA with Europe and Asia, and not to provide regional connectivity within MENA. The number of undersea cables that pass through the region without interconnection is staggering. Consequently, there is patchy submarine connectivity between the Middle Eastern parts and the North African parts of MENA (with Egypt playing a pivotal role). What this means for CloudFlare (and you) is that it takes a lot of individual PoPs to achieve broad, local coverage of broadband and mobile users in the region. It is for this reason that we’ve announced a record setting four new PoPs deployed in a single month, with even more on the way.

An additional complexity is that, even with all of the right infrastructure related ingredients, the majority of Internet content accessed in MENA is hosted far far away in North America, Europe and Asia. That is, of course, unless you are a CloudFlare user. As of now, the collective content of all 2 million+ CloudFlare users is locally accessible through the networks of our partners in the region. No additional configuration required. This re-routing of traffic is now automatically in effect for all CloudFlare users worldwide.

As the latency measurements below demonstrate, our data centers across the Middle East are already delivering significant performance improvement. In the United Arab Emirates, latency has decreased from as high as 200ms to the closest CloudFlare PoP to 10ms, a 20x improvement.

In Qatar (just in time for the upcoming World Cup) latency to Ooredoo (the incumbent operator) has decreased from 150ms to 1ms (a 150x improvement!).

The benefits also extend to some other countries and networks in the region. Latency to networks in Saudi Arabia, for example, have seen latency decline from 200-150ms to less than 50ms (a 4x improvement).

Source: Measurements from RIPE Atlas

As a whole, our first wave of MENA deployments serve traffic originating not only from Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but also traffic from networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Pakistan and the Sudan, among others. Additional PoPs are in the works to expand and amplify these benefits throughout the region.

If you are curious about how this network expansion can help your organization, get in touch with our team.

P.S. No castle was touched within the deployment of these PoPs; keep guessing! We still don't have a winner in our contest announced here.

_Map source: Undersea Cable Map of the Middle East from Greg's Cable Map._

Top of the morning to our users and readers from Ireland! Our latest PoP in Dublin is our 38th globally, and 14th in Europe following our Bucharest deployment last week. As of yesterday, traffic from Ireland's 3.6 million Internet users will now be routed through Dublin as opposed to our London PoP (which will still serve as a point of redundancy).

By now you've heard of Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, and possibly even Silicon Prairie, but across the pond there's another tech hub making quite a name for itself. Silicon Docks, the Dublin neighborhood bordering the Grand Canal Docks, is home to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, AirBnb, LinkedIn and CloudFlare customer, Yelp, just to name a few. While our own European headquarters is in London, Dublin's exploding tech scene made it an obvious choice for a new PoP.

Clearly our focus was more on helping #savetheweb than on the photo itself...

Dublin is also near to our hearts as the home of CloudFlare customers Web Summit and F.ounders, two of the world's premier tech conferences. Visitors to the 2012 Web Summit and F.ounders events may even remember being greeted by CloudFlare (see photo above) as they passed through the Dublin Airport.

Readers of our last post were asked to guess which future CloudFlare PoP will be housed in a castle-turned-data center. It isn't our Dublin facility, a modern tier-4 data center, which means 1) the "contest" continues and 2) more expansion is soon to come. But before we get to our castle, we have a big announcement coming very soon. Stay tuned!

— The CloudFlare team

Photo source: Miguel Mendez; images used under creative commons license.

Our global expansion continues in Bucharest, Romania, the 6th largest city in the European Union* following London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, and Paris (nearly all of which feature a CloudFlare PoP!). From Bucharest, our latest data center will serve all 11 million Romanian Internet users, as well as users throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

Romania is geographically situated between Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine, making it an ideal destination to attract additional Internet traffic throughout much of Eastern Europe. Of course, geographic reality is rarely a mirror of Internet reality. Adding a new point of presence doesn't automatically mean that traffic from surrounding areas (or even traffic in the very same country) will route to that particular data center. This entirely depends on the interconnection of International carriers with local Internet service providers (ISPs) and large networks like CloudFlare.

It is for this precise reason that we place even more emphasis on our interconnection within a particular PoP as opposed to the absolute number of dots we add to our network map. Of course, the combination of the two (expanding wide and deep) is even better, and is why CloudFlare is blazing fast around the world.

In Romania alone we are connected to nearly every single Tier 1 Internet provider with a network in-country (TeliaSonera, Cogent, GTT/Tinet, NTT, and Telecom Italia). And we are further connected (or nearly connected!) to nearly all local peering exchanges, including Interlan, NetIX, RoNIX and BalcanIX. Direct connections are also in progress with many of the largest local ISPs. #zoomzoom

Dracula and his supposed home—Bran Castle (commonly known as Dracula's Castle)—in Transylvania! The contrivance of Irish author Bram Stoker, Dracula recounts the story of vampire Count Dracula's attempts to move from Transylvania (in Romania) to England. Although there is no record that Stoker was aware of Bran Castle at the time of the book's writing, it remains entwined with the legend to this day.

While our Bucharest PoP is not located in a castle (but rather a modern Tier-3 data center), one of our upcoming sites will be (that's right, a castle turned into a data center). If you can guess the location in the comments, we'll have some CloudFlare gear sent your way!

— Mulţumim, echipa CloudFlare

* By population within city limits.Photo source: Marc Biarnès; images used under creative commons license.

Source: TeleGeography

What better day than the 14th of July (Bastille Day) to announce the latest addition to our network in Marseille, France? Our data center in the southern city of Marseille is our 2nd in France, 12th in Europe and 36th globally.

Marseille, France’s second largest city following Paris, is home to 2 million Internet users across the surrounding metropolitan area. It also serves as another point of redundancy to our Paris data center, one of our most trafficked facilities in the whole of Europe.

However, the true importance of Marseille is not just redundancy or its size. Marseille’s southern location makes it a major Internet gateway for networks throughout the Mediterranean, including many African and Middle Eastern countries. This is reflected by the fact that a substantial number of undersea submarine cables carrying Internet traffic are routed through Marseille (7 to be exact, and for those fastidious followers of our blog).

Marseille: a key interconnection point for traffic throughout the Mediterranean

These undersea cables are the principal means by which many countries are able to access the rest of the Internet—that is to say, access all of the other global networks that make up this big interconnected network we refer to as the Internet. In the case of Algeria, this latest deployment has reduced by half the latency to the over 2 million Internet applications using CloudFlare. In other words, all web sites and applications behind CloudFlare are now 2x as fast to access in Algeria (and in many other countries) now that Marseille is online.

If you’ve followed our previous blog posts, you’ll know that peering—the act of interconnecting with other regional networks—is critical to the fast, secure and local delivery of Internet traffic. And Marseille is no different. We’re proud to be the most recent participant on FranceIX’s Marseille Internet exchange, through which we are now able to serve traffic to networks throughout the Mediterranean. However, many large ISPs in the region, including some in Morocco and Tunisia, are not yet participants. If you are a customer of one of these ISPs, please reach out and encourage them to join!

Finally, as a result of our Marseille deployment, France is now the second country in Europe (following Germany after our Düsseldorf deployment) to host multiple CloudFlare data centers. However, it won’t be the last! Hint Hint….

_— Joyeux 14 juillet de la part de toute l’équipe CloudFlare!

(Happy Bastille Day from the CloudFlare team! for all non-french speaking blog readers)_

Move over Jurassic World, the long awaited sequel to our Tokyo deployment is here. Our Osaka data center is our 2nd in Japan, 5th in Asia (following deployments in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul), and 35th globally. This latest deployment serves not only Osaka, Japan's second largest city, but also Nagoya, the 3rd largest, and the entire Keihanshin metropolitan area including Kyoto and Kobe. This means faster application delivery to the area's 30 million inhabitants, and full redundancy of traffic with our Tokyo facility. CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from all 110 million Internet users in Japan.

Even though Asia is home to many of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, the delivery of Internet traffic across the region is hardly seamless. Many of the incumbent telecommunications providers in the region (e.g. NTT, Tata, PCCW, Hinet, Singtel, among many others) do not interconnect with one another locally. This is another way of saying that traffic is routed poorly in the region. Traffic sent from one network in Japan, for example, may have to pass through an entirely different country or, in some instances, even the United States, prior to being received by another network in Japan. What's worse is that the choke points where traffic is ultimately exchanged are often candidates for congestion (too much traffic, and too little capacity).

A metaphor (Shibuya crossing in Tokyo)

This isn't a new story, of course. European networks once found themselves in the same (sad) predicament with intra-European traffic exchanged through the United States. Fortunately, with the emergence of European based Internet exchange points (IXPs), nearly all Internet traffic in Europe now remains within Europe. Moreover, many of these exchange points such as AMS-IX in Amsterdam, DE-CIX in Frankfurt and LINX in London, among others, have become some of the biggest in the world (note: CloudFlare is a member of each of these exchanges, as well as 20 others in Europe, and over 80 globally).

Not quite, but things are changing. Unlike Europe, where economies are tens of miles apart, Asian countries are often thousands of miles apart with an ocean in the middle. In addition, where many European countries share the same, or similar languages, Internet content is Asia is highly regional due to higher language barriers.

Commercial interests also play a role. The aforementioned incumbent carriers hold significant control over the exchange of Internet traffic in their respective markets. As a means to preserve market power and inhibit competition, many refuse to interconnect with other providers locally. For example, of the two Tier 1 Internet service providers in Asia, NTT Communications (Japan) and Tata (India), neither interconnect with one another in their home markets. If you were to purchase Internet connectivity from Tata in Japan, you would have to send your traffic through Hong Kong to reach NTT's Japanese customers.

Despite this, the growth in IXPs in the region is encouraging. Osaka alone has multiple exchange points—JPIX, JPNAP, BBIX and Equinix—providing local interconnection to many Japanese networks. CloudFlare is proud to be a member of each of these exchanges. Because of our Anycast network architecture, all networks connected to us over these exchanges prefer the, now, shorter path to our network in Osaka (more below).

If you regularly follow our blog you will have noticed that the delivery of applications over the Internet is both remarkably challenging and complex. It takes a global network, direct interconnection with global and regional carriers, significant investment in hardware and infrastructure, and the teams of engineers necessary to build, operate and manage it all, in order to deploy high availability, low latency, and secure applications.

Fortunately we've done just this so that you don't have to. In Asia alone CloudFlare maintains direct connectivity to all Tier 1 operators (i.e. NTT and Tata), to major regional incumbents (e.g. Korea Telecom, PCCW, etc.), and nearly 20 Internet exchange points throughout the region.

A view from a network in Nagoya, Japan (now hitting Osaka vs. Tokyo)

The example above shows the latency improvement for a user in Nagoya (a 50 minute Shinkansen bullet train away from Osaka vs. 1 hour and 40 minutes to Tokyo). The decrease from 11ms to 7ms may not be much (although much faster than a Shinkansen train!), but it matters when you're as performance-obsessed as we are.

Whether your applications are hosted in your own data center, in the cloud (e.g. Azure, AWS, Rackspace, etc.) or with one of our many hosting partners, your applications are a 5 minute sign-up away from a faster, safer and better Internet.

Arigatō (ありがとう) - the CloudFlare team

The genesis of our 33rd and 34th data centers in Auckland and Melbourne started a short hop away in nearby Sydney. Prior to these deployments traffic from all of New Zealand and Australia's collective 23 million Internet users was routed through CloudFlare's Sydney data center. Even for those in faraway Perth, the time necessary to reach our Sydney PoP was a mere 55ms of round trip time (RTT). By comparison, the blink of an eye takes 300-400ms. In other words, latency wasn't exactly the pressing concern. The real concern was a failure scenario in our Sydney data center.

Fortunately, our entire architecture starts with an assumption: failure is going to happen. As a result, we plan for failure at every level and have designed a system to gracefully handle it when it occurs. Even though we now maintain multiple layers of redundancy—from power supplies and power circuits to line cards, routing engines and network providers—our ultimate level of redundancy is in the ability to fail out an entire data center in favor of another. In the past we've even written about how this might even play out in the case of a global thermonuclear war. In this instance, the challenge we set out to solve was not how to fail gracefully, but how to fail gracefully without materially increasing latency for the millions of applications that depend on our network in the Oceania region.

Prior to our Auckland and Melbourne data centers, a failure in Sydney meant a shift in traffic to the West Coast of the US or Southeast Asia adding significant, and noticeable, latency to our users' applications (spoiler: it now fails over to Auckland and Melbourne with minimal latency!). But before we get to how the Kiwi's and Australia's "second city" saved the day, it is important to understand how the Internet "works" in Oceania. As we set out to create resiliency in-region, we considered several options:

At first blush a second facility in Sydney would seem to solve most imaginable failure scenarios (perhaps save a nuclear one). However, when it comes to the Internet, things are rarely intuitive. Australia, at least in the context of the Internet, is very Sydney-centric. The vast majority of traffic from Australia to the rest of the Internet passes through a single data center (which just so happens to be the same exact facility in which we are currently located). Even if we were to make a redundant deployment in a completely separate facility, traffic to that facility would still have to pass through the same potential point of failure: our current facility. Not to mention, a second facility in Sydney would neither reduce latency and improve performance for a larger subset of Internet users in the region nor localize our traffic any further than it already was. It also wouldn't have opened up any new peering opportunities which, as we've explained in a prior blog post, is of immense importance to the performance and overall health of our network.

Not enough redundancy. No performance gain from status quo.

Out of left pitch came Auckland. Although not an obvious choice, Auckland is rather uniquely situated to provide redundancy in-region as a result of how many operators have constructed their networks: by building or buying a 3 drop ring between New Zealand-Australia, Australia-USA, and USA-New Zealand.

Because traffic is only heavily utilized in one direction, towards New Zealand, this leaves a lot of free capacity between New Zealand-Australia (i.e. from New Zealand). After working with various providers, we've structured a solution that allows us to reduce latency and further localize traffic for Internet users in New Zealand while also allowing for full redundancy between both Auckland, Sydney and the rest of Oceania. Not to mention, CloudFlare is now a member of New Zealand's largest peering exchange, APE-IX.

Redundancy and performance gains versus the status quo.

But why stop there?

Despite achieving the desired level of redundancy and performance gains in New Zealand through our own version of the Trans-Tasman arrangement, we figured that both Kiwi’s and Aussies would prefer not to have the others' redundancy deposited at their doorstep. So, along came Melbourne as a complement to Auckland. Our Melbourne data center offers the same benefits of content localization and performance improvement for Internet users south of the border, as well as domestic redundancy in the case of a data center failure.

Latency improvement and additional redundancy.

Problem solved, right? Almost...

The Auckland fiber situation is an interesting one. Auckland is situated around a harbour. Over this harbour is a bridge which most of the fiber in the city runs across, with a small amount running via a much longer path around the harbour (think 30km longer fiber runs). Purchasing fiber between the areas of the city separated by the harbour costs more than a Kim Dotcom political party (i.e. a lot of money).

The bulk of the country's Internet providers (particularly the smaller ones) exist only south of the harbour bridge. The cable landing stations and many of the data centers, on the other hand, only exist north of the harbour bridge. If you are as performance obsessed as we are, you want to be south of the bridge so that you can peer with all networks in as inexpensive, resilient and easy manner as possible. But for us, the vetting process didn't stop there. The specific site we selected is the core node for most major New Zealand transit providers, allows us to interconnect with nearly every provider from within the same facility, and hosts a core node of the local peering exchange.

Now that our Auckland DC is live, some users in New Zealand may notice that their ISPs continue to route to CloudFlare in Sydney. That makes no sense you say!? We agree! Despite our best efforts, it takes two to tango. Should this be the case with your ISP, let them know...hopefully that will spark a conversation.

Che, ya estamos en Argentina! It is con placer that we announce our 32nd data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our Buenos Aires data center is our 5th in Latin America following deployments in Santiago, São Paulo, Medellin, and Lima. As of this moment, CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from nearly all of Latin America's 300 million Internet users.

Argentina may be better known as the land of bife and malbec, but it is also home to a thriving tech community, including several well known start-up accelerators such as Startup Buenos Aires, Wayra and NXTP Labs (a CloudFlare customer!). At CloudFlare, we know a thing or two about the challenges of building a technology company, and we're proud to support the fast delivery of Internet applications for users in Argentina, as well as those who create them.

Although not commonly known, the title of the famous song from the musical Evita originates from an epitaph on a plaque honoring Evita Peron, and roughly translates as: "Don't cry for me Argentina, I remain quite near to you." Unfortunately, when it comes to the Internet, there is plenty of reason to cry (or at least sniffle), as the majority of online content consumed within Argentina (and all of Latin America) must be transported from quite far away.

Prior to our deployment in Buenos Aires, delivery of the nearly 2 million Internet applications on CloudFlare to the majority of Argentina's 35 million Internet users occurred through CloudFlare's data centers in Newark and Miami (200 and 170ms, respectively, of RTT away from Buenos Aires), with the remainder served in-region from our other data centers in Latin America. In both cases, multiple International carriers are involved in delivering traffic from our network to the ultimate end user. Also keep in mind that this issue is not CloudFlare specific. The vast majority of online content consumed in Latin America is delivered from even further away in the various geographies in which it is hosted (Europe, Asia, Oceania, etc.), with even more severe latency.

At play are two overarching, and related, dynamics. The first relates to the domicile of online content. It is estimated that upwards of 80-90% of online content accessed in Latin America is hosted outside of Latin America. This also includes locally produced content, as the cost of hosting is often less expensive in the United States and Europe. Consequently, to access online content Internet users within Latin America must travel longer distances, which means a slower Internet. This is where CloudFlare steps in allowing any individual or enterprise to easily localize their content across our global network. In regions where ISPs/networks are highly interconnected, this typically means that one or more CloudFlare's data centers is very close by. However, in regions with less local interconnection, such as in Argentina (and Latin America at large), the closest point of interconnection may be quite far away (as in the case above with traffic routing to Newark and Miami).

This is where the second dynamic comes in: interconnection. For many ISPs in Latin America, it is less expensive to purchase Internet connectivity in the United States (e.g., delivered across a submarine cable), than to purchase that same access locally. As a result, interconnection between ISPs/networks frequently occurs outside of the region, which means that content can only be accessed outside of the region (even if it is hosted locally!). Fortunately, much progress is being made to foster network interconnection locally. This progress takes the form of increased competition between providers on price and quality of service, a policy environment that recognizes the importance of local interconnection, and the development of local IXPs (Internet exchange points).

If you're on CloudFlare, your content is, as of today, available locally

It is this last development—the formation of IXPs—that is greatly facilitating the local interconnection of networks and the exchange of content. As part of our Buenos Aires deployment we've established connectivity with CABASE, an association of IXPs in Argentina. CABASE's association includes numerous interconnected IXPs throughout Argentina, allowing ISPs from Mendoza to La Plata to exchange traffic within the country. CABASE, like PTT.br (an IXP in Brazil in which CloudFlare is also a participant) is a great model for Internet connectivity in the region. Our participation in the IXP allows us to cache our customers' content locally, and exchange it with ISPs across the entire country. Say hasta luego to Newark and Miami (sorry Will Smith).

For those that read our previous post about our Düsseldorf deployment, we encouraged readers to guess our next three datacenter locations. Only one guessed Buenos Aires, but two more locations are at large. Stay tuned!

Hallo Düsseldorf. Nestled in the center of the Lower Rhine basin lies the bustling city of Düsseldorf, capital of Germany’s most populous state, Northern Rhine-Westphalia. Provided its status as an international business and telecommunications hub, and serving a population larger than the Netherlands, our data center in Düsseldorf is an important addition to our European network. This means not only better performance in Germany and Northern Europe, but additional redundancy for our 10 other data centers throughout Europe, including our first German data center in Frankfurt.

For the local audience: Liebe Freunde in Düsseldorf, euer Internetanschluss ist schneller geworden und ihr könnt jetzt sicher surfen. Viel Spaß.

Dusseldorf comes to life.

Our Düsseldorf data center holds a special place in the heart of our legal counsel Ken Carter. When he’s not helping to build a better Internet, he is likely to be found regaling the office with tales of his adventures in the quaint medieval town of Bad Honnef am Rhein, just south of our new data center. Ban Honnef, most famously known as the world-wide headquarters for Birkenstock, can now add one more tale of note. Equidistant between Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, it is now one of the best served cities by CloudFlare in Germany.

Dusseldorf is the first in a wave of new CloudFlare data centers yet to come this year. At this very moment we have infrastructure present in, or in flight to, over 10 new sites. If you can guess one of the next three (in the comments below), we'll send you some free CloudFlare gear.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen Ihr CloudFlare

Photo source: Sergey Sokolov; image used under creative commons license.

Fire up the celebration braai, Jozi! CloudFlare is here, and it’s a big one. An important milestone (our 30th data center) calls for an equally important new location: Johannesburg, South Africa, our first data center in Africa.

For the local audience: Steek aan 'n braai ter viering, Jozi! CloudFlare is hier en dis 'n groot een. 'n Belangrike mylpaal (ons 30ste datasentrum), vra vir ewe belangrike en nuwe ligging: Johannesburg, Suid-Afrika, ons eerste datasentrum in Afrika.

Prior to now nearly all CloudFlare traffic delivered to Africa was served from our London, Amsterdam and Hong Kong data centers with round trip latency of 200-350ms. Bandwidth in the region is notoriously expensive (it would make even the Australians blush) making it prohibitive to enter into the continent. That is, before now. Just a few months ago we were fortunate to enter into discussions with a number of partners in the region that share CloudFlare’s vision to help build a better Internet.

Our Johannesburg data center will not only make sites on CloudFlare more performant for Internet users in South Africa, but also for Internet users across all of Southern Africa (and beyond). From Botswana to Kenya, users across the region will see a significant performance improvement when visiting any site or mobile app using CloudFlare.

As the latency measurements below demonstrate, our data center in Johannesburg is already delivering serious performance improvement across all of Southern Africa. In South Africa itself, latency has decreased from over 300ms to as low as 3ms, a 100x improvement.

The same is true from the network of Telkom, the local South African incumbent, where latency decreased from 200ms to as low as 13ms (15x improvement).

In Zambia, latency has decreased from over 200ms to 28ms (7x improvement).

And even Kenya, nearly 2,400 miles (3,800 kilometers) from South Africa, has seen latency decline from 150ms to 71ms (2x improvement).

Source: Measurements from RIPE Atlas

Internet penetration, broadband subscriptions, IXP deployment and overall available bandwidth in Africa are measurably lower as compared to the rest of the world. But this is quickly changing. It is with great satisfaction that we do our part to help bridge the digital divide. We hope you enjoy this news as much as we had making it all happen.

Special thanks to South African CloudFlare engineers Albert and Gerhard for all translations

Just when you thought we’d reached the end, CloudFlare’s Latin America data center expansion continues. Hot on the heels of our recent expansion into Santiago, São Paulo, and Medellin, this holiday season commences in Lima with our 29th data center globally, and our fourth in Latin America.

Latin America is the fastest growing source of traffic to CloudFlare's network, with nearly 10x growth in just the last twelve months. Our new data center in Lima reduces the latency to access any site using CloudFlare, increases web performance for users in the region from Iquitos to Tacna, and adds another point of redundancy. It also increases the capacity and surface area of the CloudFlare network to absorb massive cyber attacks. This is of particular benefit to CloudFlare customers the Presidency of Peru and the ONPE, Peru’s National Election Office. In the lead up to the Peruvian elections this month, CloudFlare partnered with the Government of Peru to ensure that local elections go off without a hitch — no easy feat when voter turnout is expected to reach nearly 90%. Whether you are running a site, mobile app, or national election we have an offering for you.

Coming to a (new) continent near you

Despite a growing, global network of 29 data centers in 21 countries, our chamba (work) is never done. Our team of infrastructure, network, and special projects elves are currently cobbling together over 20 new data center sites over the holidays. Rest assured, the CloudFlare workshop won’t close until the security and performance benefits of CloudFlare are available to children site owners everywhere. Where will the big 3-0th be, you ask? (Hint) Let’s just say it won’t be in the North Pole...yet. Lekker!