Cloudflare is excited to announce the addition of ten new data centers across the United States, Bahrain, Russia, Vietnam, Pakistan and France (Réunion). We're delighted to help improve the performance and security of over 12 million domains across these diverse countries that collectively represent about half a billion Internet users.

Our global network now spans 165 cities, with 46 new cities added just this year, and several dozen additional locations being actively worked on.

Our expansion begins in the United States, where Cloudflare's 36th and 37th data centers in the nation serve Charlotte (North Carolina) and Columbus (Ohio) respectively. They are promising markets for interconnection, and join our existing deployments in Ashburn, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, McAllen, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis, Montgomery, Nashville, Newark, Norfolk, Omaha, Philadelphia, Portland, Richmond, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, Tallahassee, and Tampa.

Cloudflare's Manama (Bahrain) data center, our 158th globally, further expands our Middle East coverage. A growing hub for cloud computing, including public sector adoption (with the Kingdom's "Cloud First" policy), Bahrain is attracting talent and investment in innovative companies.

Cloudflare's new St. Petersburg deployment serves as a point of redundancy to our existing Moscow facility, while also expanding our surface area to withstand DDoS attacks and reducing latency for local Internet users. (Hint: If you live in Novosibirsk or other parts of Russia, stay tuned for upcoming Cloudflare deployments near you).

Hànội and Hồ Chí Minh City, the two most populated cities in Vietnam with an estimated population of 8 million and 9 million respectively, now host Cloudflare's 160th and 161st data center.

On November 19, 1997, the Internet officially became available in Vietnam. Since then, several telecommunication companies - including VNPT, FPT, Viettel, CMC, VDC, and NetNam - have played a critical role in integrating the use of Internet into the government systems, business environment, school facilities, and many other organizations. With our new data centers in place, we are delighted to help provide a faster and safer Internet experience.  

The world's sixth most populous country, Pakistan is a land of delicious food, breathtaking natural beauty, poetry and, of course cricket. Its natural beauty is exemplified by being the home of 5 out of 14 mountains which are at least 8,000m high, including K2, the second highest peak in the world. Pakistan's rich history includes the 5,000 year old lost civilization of Mohenjo-daro, with incredible design from complex architecture on a grid-layout to advanced water and sewage systems.

Nanga Parbat - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Today, Cloudflare is unveiling three new data centers housed in Pakistan, one in each of the most populous cities - Karachi and Lahore - alongside an additional data center in the capital city, Islamabad. We are already seeing latency per request decrease by over 3x and as much as 150ms, and expect this to further improve as we tune routing for all our customers.

Latency from PTCL to Cloudflare customers reduces by over 3x across Pakistan. Courtesy: Cedexis

8,000 miles away, the final stop in today's expansion is Sainte-Marie in the Réunion island, the overseas department France off the coast of Magadascar (which can also expect some Cloudflare servers very soon!)

Even beyond these, we are working on at least six new cities in each of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Guess 20 upcoming locations to receive Cloudflare swag.

Photo by Karsten Würth (@inf1783) / Unsplash

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. While working toward our goals, we want to make sure our processes are conducted in a sustainable manner.

In an effort to do so, we’ve reduced Cloudflare’s environmental impact by contracting to purchase regional renewable energy certificates, or “RECs,” to match 100% of the electricity used in our North American data centers as well as our U.S. offices. Cloudflare now has servers in 154 unique cities around the world, with 38 located in North America. Cloudflare has opted to support geographically diverse projects in proximity to our office and data center electricity usage. This renewable energy initiative reduces our electricity-based carbon footprint by 5,561 tons of CO2 which has a positive environmental impact. The impact can be compared to growing 144,132 trees seedlings for 10 years, or taking 1,191 cars off the road for one year.

How does buying a REC help reduce Cloudflare's carbon footprint you may ask? When 1MWh of electricity is produced from a renewable generator, such as a wind turbine, there are two products: the energy, which is delivered to the grid and mixes with other forms of energy, and the REC. When renewable energy is delivered to the grid, it cannot be distinguished from electrons from non-renewable sources. The REC is a way to track the renewable electricity and is like a receipt for owning the environmental benefits associated with the generation of renewable energy. RECs allow individuals and businesses to support renewable energy development and help to make renewable energy projects financially viable while lowering carbon footprints.

This purchase is an important step on our sustainability path. It is part of a broader sustainability effort which includes working with more data centers that specialize in lowering their PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), as well as waste diversion and energy efficiency measures already in place in our offices worldwide. Moving forward, we plan to increase our renewable energy commitment to match energy used in our data centers and offices globally. We look forward to this and other opportunities to increase support of renewable energy and reduce our carbon footprint!

When Cloudflare launched, three of the original five cities in our network - Chicago, Ashburn and San Jose - were located in the United States. Since then, we have grown the breadth of the global network considerably to span 66 countries, and even expanded the US footprint to twenty five locations. Even as a highly international business, the United States continues to be home to a number of our customers and the majority of Cloudflare employees.

Today, we expand our network in the United States even further by adding five new locations: Houston (Texas), Indianapolis (Indiana), Montgomery (Alabama), Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and Sacramento (California) as our 129th, 130th, 131st, 132nd and 133rd data centers respectively. They represent states that collectively span nearly 100 million people. In North America alone, the Cloudflare network now spans 37 cities, including thirty in the US.

In each of these new locations, we connect with at least one major local Internet service provider and also openly peer using at least one major Internet exchange. We are participants at CyrusOne IX Houston, Midwest IX Indianapolis, Montgomery Internet Exchange, Pittsburgh IX, and the upcoming Sacramento IX.

These deployments improves performance, security and reliability for our customers, even while expanding the edge (and the compute capability it enables). In the not too distant future, we’d like to deploy at cell towers across major metro markets (and beyond!) to support the next generation of 5G-enabled applications.

With the launch of our next data center, Cloudflare will have deployments located in all of the ten most populous North American metropolitan areas.

This map reflects the network as of the publish date of this blog post. For the most up to date directory of locations please refer to our Network Map on the Cloudflare site.

Even as the luckiest amongst us across the US West Coast dashed off to Oregon to be closer to the solar eclipse path of totality, Cloudflare engineers were busy turning up our newest data center in Portland.

This deployment serves as our 27th data center in North America alone, and our 117th globally. It also provides additional redundancy to our Seattle and San Jose data centers, while increasing our capacity to run services and fight growing attacks.

The Silicon Forest corridor around Portland holds a special place in the hearts of the Cloudflare team. It is both new (by way of our latest edge deployment bringing us closer to millions of Oregon Internet users), and familiar (since we have had an internal data center in this region for many years, enabling services such as analytics and enterprise logs).

The greater Portland area has played a pivotal area in building high-technology products from companies such as Tektronix (test and measurement equipment), Mentor Graphics (electronic design automation) and Intel (with nearly 20,000 employees across Oregon).

At our Portland data center, we locally interconnect with ISPs such as Comcast (into their regional area networks such as Beaverton and Troutdale), and also to the Northwest Access Exchange (a volunteer non-profit internet exchange fostering peering).

This is part of a much broader expansion, as we are actively working on at least a dozen additional data centers within North America alone, and over 50 new cities around the world. If managing the moving parts of building a large global network sounds interesting, come join us!

Cloudflare is excited to announce deployments in Detroit (Michigan) and San Diego (California), which are our 114th and 115th data centers respectively. They join Colombo, Sri Lanka and Cape Town, South Africa in the cohort of four new cities added just this week to our growing global network, which spans 57 countries and counting.

For over 6 million Internet properties, we now serve customer traffic from across 26 North American cities, including 22 in the United States alone. We're not going to stop building our network until we're within milliseconds of every Internet user, and to that end, data centers are already in the works in eight additional North American cities (and many others around the world).

_Source: Baja Insider_

Detroit and San Diego share something special, as they are immediately adjacent to international borders with Canada and Mexico respectively. Detroit has four border crossings to Windsor, Ontario, including the Ambassador Bridge, which was built in the Roaring Twenties, and accommodates over a quarter of all merchandise trade with Canada.

Founded in 1701, and best known for cars and Motown, Detroit eagerly awaits a 3,000 pound bronze RoboCop statue to watch over Delta City (track progress here). An early member of our technical operations team and fan of Detroit Techno is especially excited that this month's Movement Electronic Music Festival is a Cloudflare customer.

San Diego, the second largest city (by population) in California, is home to deep canyons and its world renowned San Diego Zoo. Later this month, skateboarders across San Diego will celebrate Tony Hawk Day.

Projects such as the non-profit Internet exchange DET-IX, enable greater regional interconnection, bringing together hosts, ISPs, and "edge" networks (such as Cloudflare), to exchange traffic locally instead of further away in Chicago. As we turn up peering with additional networks in the coming weeks, we expect to serve a growing share of Internet users in Detroit and San Diego right from their city.

Stay tuned for more data centers. The world's bluest sky will soon welcome the Cloudflare orange cloud.

CC-BY 2.0 image by Vincent Parsons

Kansas City, Missouri. Home to the Kansas City Royals, Swope Park, over 100 barbeque restaurants, and now, Cloudflare's 106th data center. We are excited to help make 6 million websites even faster in the Midwest, as our newest deployment joins existing United States facilities in Ashburn, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami,Minneapolis, Nashville, Newark, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, and Tampa.

CC-BY 2.0 image by Shelby Bell

Anthony Bourdain said it best with regards to Joe's KC BBQ in his "13 Places to Eat Before You Die" (alongside Michelin 3-star restaurants like French Laundry and Le Bernardin):

"People may disagree on who has the best BBQ. Here, the brisket (particularly the burnt ends), pulled pork, and ribs are all of a quality that meet the high standards even of Kansas City natives. It's the best BBQ in Kansas City, which makes it the best BBQ in the world."

Visit Kansas City to find the world’s largest shuttlecocks outside the Nelson Atkins Art Museum, as four 18-foot tall badminton birdies span across the lawn.

If you love blues, jumpin jazz and zydeco, you'll love the archives of Fish Fry from KCUR, Kansas City public radio. (Cloudflare team members from New Orleans who proofread this are adamant that we need a data center there, pronto).

From BBQ to Pljeskavica, the next data center to go live takes us to a city 5,377 miles away. Can you guess where it is?

Each birthday has given us the opportunity to thank our customers with new announcements, from our automatic IPv6 Gateway to making SSL free and easy for all to unveiling our China network. Launching 14 new data center locations is one of many gifts to our users we’ll reveal this week.

Cloudflare global network (orange: new data center, purple: existing data center)

Six years ago, within weeks of Cloudflare launching, we passed a major milestone: serving one billion web requests across our network every month. Since then, our traffic has grown 10,000x, and we now see over a billion web requests every month just from the country of Angola — located on the western coast of southern Africa and three times the geographic size of California. This led us on a journey to deploy our newest data center in Luanda, the capital city, shaving 150ms in latency off every request and joining our existing Africa data centers in Cairo, Mombasa and Johannesburg.

Latency (ms) decreases 10x for an Internet user in Luanda to Cloudflare. Source: Cedexis

Angola has seen a 280x increase in Internet users over the past 15 years, growing to 6 million Internet people. This figure is already higher than Denmark, and growing ten times as fast. That said, even today, fewer than one in four Angolans are online so there’s huge potential for more growth ahead. We’re committed to building infrastructure across Africa and to supporting the next billion people coming online.

In the United States, where Internet penetration is significantly higher (~90%), our expansion continues as we announce the launch of seven data centers at one go: Boston, Las Vegas, Nashville, Omaha, Philadelphia, St Louis, and Tampa. Many of our customers are businesses and blogs alike serving visitors in these markets in US states with a combined population of over 50 million people. Our newest US data centers not only reduce latency for millions of websites, but also provide additional redundancy to each other and to our existing North America data centers in Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Montréal, Newark, Phoenix, San Jose, Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Cloudflare began as winners of the Harvard Business Plan competition in Boston, and the admission programs at both Harvard and MIT — two great Boston-based universities — are proud Cloudflare customers. We are very proud to now operate a data center in Boston. Since our last birthday, we have doubled both the number of data centers, and our aggregate edge capacity in North America.

Iberian peninsula (including Lisbon, Portugal) courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory

Our newest European data centers in Athens, Lisbon and Helsinki truly represent the breadth of the 750 million person continent, and join our existing datacenters in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest, Copenhagen, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kiev, London, Madrid, Manchester, Marseille, Milan, Moscow, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Sofia, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw, and Zürich. (To close observers of the Iberian peninsula photo, there is another major city displayed which is days away from having a live Cloudflare data center).

While our Buenos Aires, Argentina data center has held the record for being our southernmost deployment (34° S), Helsinki now takes the prize for our northernmost deployment (60° N), and becomes our third PoP within 500 miles (800 km) of the Arctic Circle.

Over 9,000 miles away (14,500 km), one of the farthest cities from Helsinki is the sunny city of Brisbane, Australia, also home to a new Cloudflare data center. This is our fifth data center in the region, joining Auckland, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

There is no excuse now for Telstra and Optus not to peer with us as we have physical presence in the four largest population centers in Australia.

Manila, Philippines. Source: Jensen Ching (Flickr)

New data centers in Manila and Shanghai further grow our Asia network to 37 unique cities, joining Bangkok, Chengdu, Chennai, Doha, Dongguan, Dubai, Foshan, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Hengyang, Jinan, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait City, Langfang, Luoyang, Mumbai, Muscat, Nanning, New Delhi, Osaka, Qingdao, Seoul, Shenyang, Shijiazhuang, Singapore, Suzhou, Taipei, Tokyo, Wuhan, Wuxi, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, and Zhuzhou.

Our global expansion is by no means done with these fourteen freshly deployed data centers, as we have twice as many additional cities in the works right now.

While new cities make for especially fun announcements, under the hood, we’ve been making a series of upgrades to prepare for the demands of the next generation of Internet-facing applications. These include:

• achieving high security and compliance standards

• deploying our newest generation of servers and networking gear

• growing our interconnection through both private peering and at more public internet exchanges than any other company, while doubling our network capacity to 10 Tbps (more than the publicly announced DDoS scrubbing capacity of all our competitors combined)

• increasing our availability by solving gnarly edge cases and deploying greater automation

Every Cloudflare server globally can perform all our features such as DDoS mitigation, DNS, HTTP2 support, SSL and our newest offerings to be announced later this week. We’re grateful for our customers’ support on our journey to these first 100 data centers, and look forward to the next 100.

－ The Cloudflare Team

Hello from the Mile High City! Denver is our twelfth data center in the United States, and our 82nd data center globally, improving regional web performance.

Near the iconic Rocky Mountains, Denver brews more beer than any other American city, and is home to a thriving technology and entrepreneurship community. The Colorado community brought us companies such as Chipotle, HomeAdvisor, and LogRhythm - and is helping build the next great Colorado company.

Despite having a unique place on the map of the United States, and it's significant distance from other cities (900 miles to Dallas; 1,000 miles to Chicago, 1,000 miles to Los Angeles), Denver has not always been a major point of regional interconnection. Through the efforts of the community, and greater localized peering of traffic, this is changing for the better.

Visitors to millions of websites using ISPs, big or small, such as Aerux, Blackfoot, Comcast and CenturyLink, should see a 2x increase in performance, as they are now served from our Denver data center.

CloudFlare participates at two major internet exchanges: Any2 Denver and IX-Denver.

Latency in milliseconds halves for end user (Denver) to CloudFlare. Source: Cedexis

Denver joins CloudFlare's existing United States data centers in Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Newark, Phoenix, San Jose, and Seattle. In the continued pursuit of faster performance, we have data centers at another dozen North American cities in the works.

Our week of expansion isn't done. Tomorrow, we head to one of the world's largest cities.

Photo sources: Bryce Bradford (Flickr) and Cedexis

In Oslo, we have now built our third data center in Scandinavia. This joins our existing facilities in Stockholm and Copenhagen. With a data center in Norway, we recognize an important country that stands above others with a staggering 95.05% of the population having Internet connectivity. This Internet penetration rate is the fourth best in the world. For reference, the Internet penetration rate in the US is 84%, the UK is 90% and Egypt, where we deployed our last data center it is only 50%

At 59.9500° N, Oslo is also the “northernmost” CloudFlare data center on our network map.

Oslo, according to the Norwegian Sagas is over 1,000 years old. CloudFlare has built itself into a facility just a handful of years old and while we respect all the wonderful history and tradition associated with Norway, we hope the locals appreciate our 21st century choice.

Norway has a very important position within the history of the Internet (well the ARPANET actually). In June 1973, the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway became one of the first international connections to the ARPANET. It seems CloudFlare is just catching up with that history.

Norwegian domains end in .NO and Norway’s country TLD operator, NORID, recently upgraded their support to allow CloudFlare users to correctly setup their domains with full DNSSEC protection. NORID added support for ECDSA Algorithm-13, which means that all .NO domains can now use DNSSEC with CloudFlare. We are grateful for their quick actions in this area and hope that returning the favor of adding Oslo to our map continues this road to better protection of DNS traffic.

In Oslo we have connected to the Norwegian Internet Exchange NIX and the Free Internet Exchange Oslo FIXO. Both will provide us with excellent coverage of the local Norwegian networks.

Norway’s excellence in Internet penetration is not the only area they excel in. Norway is also a large oil producer. In typical Scandinavian fashion the country has collected the revenue carefully and thought about its impact on current and future generations. We admire that the Norwegians have been able to save enough to provide for future generations via the "oil fund". CloudFlare, via its careful fiscal mindset, also expects to continue serving Internet customers, well into future generations.

We are excited about placing Oslo on the CloudFlare map as our 75th data center. The studious followers of CloudFlare’s expansion plans will realize we still have more Nordic countries to add to that ever-growing map. Stay tuned!

Map courtesy of gcmap.com

And yet, as we pointed out above, around 4,000 miles to the west, CloudFlare has followed the path of nearly a million Norwegians and decided to also put down roots in Minneapolis. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are on the map as data center number 76.

Minnesota has around 16.5% of its population with an ancestry claimed from Norway. They migrated over the last two centuries and brought with them some of their culinary customs. (e.g. lutefisk and lefse). Lefse is a hand-rolled potato-based dough that produces a soft flatbread unique to Norway. It’s yummy. As for the gelatinous lutefisk (it’s an aged and dried cod) that’s served on top of that flatbread, it’s absolutely an acquired taste (and smell). A quick review shows there’s some CloudFlare employees that love it; some that don’t. We won’t share the exact results of that poll. You, the reader, can make your own decision.

Minnesota includes some pretty famous people with Norwegian descent. Garrison Keillor, of A Prairie Home Companion fame, comes to mind. Or is that just the personas depicted within the character's in Lake Wobegon that come off as Norwegian descendants? All we know is that there’s a statue of the Unknown Norwegian in Lake Wobegon.

Gene Amdahl is one amazing computer guy with parents of Norwegian descent. He’s one of the greatest contributors to large scale computers there ever was. First at IBM and then his own mainframe company, Amdahl Corporation. He was born in South Dakota; but we mention him here because North and South Dakota will be well-served by our Minnesota-based Minneapolis data center.

Yes, our Minneapolis data center will be able to serve more than just Minnesota. With the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange MICE, a local peering point, having CloudFlare as a new participant, we know we will be able to provide our customers with excellent coverage of this area.

Its exciting to announce these two data centers with their wonderful historical linking; but like we always say: stay tuned to hear about the next one!

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

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

There is a large hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean which is likely to come on-shore in the Eastern United States late tomorrow. Dubbed Sandy, the current track of the hurricane has it making landfall around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. High winds and rain from the hurricane will likely impact two of CloudFlare's data centers: Ashburn, VA and Newark, NJ.

In both locations, the vendors that run the buildings have taken steps to ensure that service is not interrupted. Specifically:

• Backup generators have been tested, fuel tanks are full, levels verified, and backup fuel vendors have been placed on standby in the event of extended power interruption.

• Special arrangements have been made to make sure staff is available on site as necessary to maintain operability standards.

• Hotel rooms near the sites have been secured, cots are in the facilities, MREs, and other emergency supplies, are available should the situation become extreme.

That is comforting, but what is more comforting is that the CloudFlare network is designed to have no single points of failure. If connectivity is lost in any of our data centers -- due to a hurricane, earthquake, or someone just tripping over a power cable -- traffic automatically fails over to the next closest data center.

If your website is hosted in a region that is likely to be impacted by Sandy, signing up for CloudFlare can help ensure that your site stays online. Even if the effects of the hurricane are significant for the region, CloudFlare will continue to serve the static portions of your site via our Always Online feature.

We've been through hurricanes before with Irene about a year ago.We're keeping a close eye on the hurricane and will post updates to @CloudFlareSys and our System Status page if there is any impact to our Ashburn or Newark facilities. However, you can rest assured that even if there is a regional interruption, it won't impact the availability of CloudFlare's service.

Last week we turned up three new data centers in Sydney, Atlanta, and Seattle. This week we are launching the next location to continue to expand CloudFlare's global network. Our ops team just put the final touches on our latest North American facility in Toronto, Canada. Traffic has begun flowing through the facility which will build up its cache over the next 24 hours. Going forward, it will take load away from Chicago and Newark and improve CloudFlare's performance in much of Canada.

CloudFlare has deep Canadian DNA. Michelle, who co-founded CloudFlare with Lee and me, grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada. She attended college at McGill University in Montreal then began her career in Toronto. If you appreciate CloudFlare's easy-to-use, no-nonsense interface, and our relentless focus on building a product that is great for our users, you have Michelle to thank.

Beyond her work at CloudFlare, Michelle works to ensure that the Internetecosystem is as healthy as possible. She was invited to represent Internet technology startups on the United States Federal Communication Commission's Open Internet Advisory Committee. At CloudFlare we're working to build a better Internet. That extends beyond the technology we deploy in data centers around the world, but also to work Michelle and other members of our team do to create the policies that will ensure a healthy and vibrant web worldwide.

Given CloudFlare's deep connections to Canada it was high time we opened a facility there. What's next? Assuming some cooperation from customs in a few countries in Europe and Asia, we'll be bringing five more facilities online over the coming several days. Stay tuned!

Our ops team is on a roll! Hot on the heels of Sydney and Atlanta going live yesterday, we're happy to announce Seattle, Washington as the location of CloudFlare's 17th data center. We just turned on the facility and traffic will ramp up over the next few hours. The facility will help serve traffic from the Pacific Northwest and take load off San Jose, which is one of our busiest data centers currently.

This update also marks a dramatic change to the CloudFlare Network Map. For quite some time, the map matched the overall color scheme of CloudFlare's site and represented the land mass with a blue color. You'd be amazed how many customers wrote in to tell us that we'd made a mistake and the water should be blue, not the land. It became a bit of a joke around the office.

It is therefore with some sadness I report that Kevin, our designer, has given in to the masses and switched away from the blue land network map. The new map represents everything as shades of gray. I find it somewhat more ominous, but hopefully it'll end people's confusion.

Oh, and in the process of writing this, I just noticed we crossed 400 billion page views through our network and 40 petabytes of bandwidth saved for our users, which is pretty cool too. Stay tuned, six more data centers coming online soon. Any guesses what city in what country we'll turn on next?

We're not slowing down! Just a few hours ago we launched Sydney, Australia as CloudFlare's 15th data center. Now our ops team just threw the switch and turned on Atlanta, Georgia as CloudFlare's 16th. I told you to stay tuned! These are the first two of nine new facilities we're turning up over the next few weeks.

I'm not sure what to say about Atlanta. It's the home of Coca Cola, which our team drinks a lot of. In fact, John Graham-Cumming, one of our engineers who works from London, objects whenever we make him fly VirginAtlantic to San Francisco because they only serve Pepsi.

The other connection is my and Michelle's former business school classmate, Fred Smith. Fred was very supportive when we were working on the original plan for CloudFlare and now lives in Atlanta where he's working on opening a nightclub. Fred also happens to be one of the stars of Bravo's new reality television show "Taking Atlanta" formerly known as "Atlanta's Most Eligible"). Tune in this Fall!

Another connection to Atlanta is it is home to one of our App partners: Codeguard. Codeguard makes it easy to make sure your website is always backed up. The founder and CEO, David Moeller, may not be on Taking Atlanta, but he is certainly running one of Atlanta's hottest startups. Interestingly, David was previously on another reality TV show "American Inventor" where he pitched The Claw bicycle mount. What's with Atlanta and reality TV? Weird.

Anyway, here's to Fred, Coca-Cola, Codeguard, Atlanta, and more CloudFlare data centers! More to come, stay tuned...

We're happy to announce that CloudFlare's Miami data center is now online. Our 14th data center has been in the works for some time now. The new facility, which is among our largest, will serve much of Central and South America, significantly decreasing latency and expanding capacity for one of our fastest growing regions. If the web seems a bit faster in South Americatomorrow, now you'll know why.

The Miami data center, which is housed in the NAP of the Americas, is already serving more than 1.1 Gbps of traffic just a few minutes after going online. We expect the amount of traffic will continue to grow over the coming weeks, taking load away from our existing data center in Ashburn, which has traditionally been one of our busiest, as well as Dallas and Los Angeles.

We've begun our plans for further network expansion in 2012. If we don't already have a location near you, just wait... we will soon.

Some people from Texas (hint: Terry, our network engineer, hails from Texas) were confused when we said we brought up our data center in Paris. They thought we meant Paris, Texas, not Paris, France. We wanted to end that confusion as quickly as possible, so following hot on the heels of Paris (France) going live, we're turning on the Dallas (Texas) data center.

Turns out the Dallas, Texas and Paris, Texas aren't that far apartgeographically. What surprised me is that Paris, France and Dallas, Texas aren't that far apart culturally either. (Now I've just offended the French, or maybe the Texans... again.) The French seem to have a fascination with the 80s TV show "Dallas." Check out the following clip from the national news in France discussing the important question of "What Shot JR?"

CloudFlare's goal is to make the Internet faster and safer wherever you are. So now, whichever Paris you're in, sites on CloudFlare will be evenfaster.

P.S. - Turns out it was Kristin who shot JR. Shocker, I know!

Swimming pools, movie stars, and now CloudFlare!

We just turned on our latest data center (#6) in Los Angeles. In its first minute, the facility processed more than 30,000 requests. We expect that number to rise over the next 24 hours. The Los Angeles data center will take load away from San Jose, which has traditionally been one of our busiest data centers, and will provide faster service for Hollywood types and other visitors coming from the Southwestern United States.

The Los Angeles data center (which we refer to internally as LAX, after the region's airport) is also the first new CloudFlare facility to include the second generation of our hardware stack. We'll be publishingmore details about the benefits of our new hardware stack, as well as more announcements of new data centers, in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

We often get asked why adding more data centers matters. There are several technical reasons, but as a simple overview: If a visitor that lives in San Francisco visits a website on the Cloudflare platform, the visitor gets routed to the San Jose data center. Whereas, if a visitor that lives in Chicago requests the same website, then the visitor gets routed through our Chicago data center. Without Cloudflare, visitors are typically routed through one data center. So if the data center is in San Jose, then the San Francisco visitor has the same experience, but the Chicago-based visitor's request has to go all the way from Chicago to San Jose. This of course takes longer than if the request just had to go to another address in Chicago.

So, by routing traffic through data centers closest to the visitor, the visitor sees a performance boost to the website they are visiting. There is a lot of research that shows that the faster a website loads, the longer a visitor stays. Cloudflare wants to make it easy for any website online to have fast site performance so their visitors keep coming back.

Sri is our network engineer that makes sure everyone's traffic gets delivered quickly. Here he is in the San Jose data center. It was a long day getting the servers and other equipment racked, but Sri kept his calm. A lot of data bits are flowing through these cables now. Thanks Sri!