CloudFlare extends reach into Australia

Opens first datacentre in Australia and another eight in other global locations

Web performance and security vendor, CloudFlare, has extended its reach into Australia by opening its first datacentre in Sydney.

It is part of its strategy to multiply its global datacentre presence as it will be launching eight other datacentres in Atlanta, Seattle, Toronto, Seoul, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw and Prague.

The company currently has 23 datacentres in global locations, and will be doubling the size of its London facility.

CloudFlare CEO, Matthew Prince, attributed a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEDC), which showed bandwidth in Australia the world’s slowest and most expensive.

“Australia has been one of the regions in the world where bandwidth has been problematic for us. Part of making the Web faster is that we want to be located in facilities where Web traffic is already going to be flowing through,” he said.

It recently made arrangements with Australian telecommunication service providers such as Telstra and Pacnet Australia to lower bandwidth costs for its datacentre. The company is also looking into datacentre expansion into Latin America and China. “What it means is that if you’re a global company and if you have visitors to your website from all around the world, you don’t have to change your hosting provider, application or website codes. We use our global network to ensure faster bandwidth,” Prince said.

CloudFlare also mentioned that is in talks of possibly opening up another two datacentres in Australia – one in Melbourne and the other in Perth. In line with the datacentre growth, the company will be making more staff hires within its San Francisco base. The company also recently launched a new Web optimisation software, Railgun, that aims to speed up the delivery of content that cannot be cached. Railgun overcomes this problem by using a scheme that is able to cache dynamically generated or personalised Web pages.