Cloudflare has expanded its data centers to three adding a new location in San Jose this week. By adding data centers to our platform, Cloudflare can deliver even faster site performance.
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!