Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder of CloudFlare
Canadian connectivity just got a lot faster, according to
CloudFlare—a web performance and security company based out of San Francisco.
CloudFlare currently runs 17 data centres around the world. Last week, the web
services company launched a data centre in Toronto—its first ever in
Canada—bringing increased web connection speeds to the land of the Canucks, and
reportedly saving Canadian customers thousands of dollars on bandwidth
costs.
“CloudFlare is a service that makes running a website
easier,” said Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of CloudFlare and a Saskatchewan
native. When a website signs up with CloudFlare, its traffic begins to flow
through CloudFlare’s network. CloudFlare is then able to cache out the web
content and save a copy in its new Toronto data centre location. By storing
content closer to the visitor, the website loads much faster—twice as fast, on
average, as compared to sites that are not supported by CloudFlare, Zatlyn
noted. “If your website used to take three
seconds to load and now it takes 1.5 seconds, that's a huge performance benefit,”
she said. “And we constantly see that as the website speeds up, people spend
more time on it.”
Still, only about 66% of web content is cacheable, Zatlyn
explained. The other 34% must be obtained from the website’s server of origin. The
cacheable content on a website might include images, Javascript, CSS and
HTML—all static copy which can be stored in CloudFlare’s Toronto data centre. As
for the rest, CloudFlare recently launched Railgun, new web optimization software, designed to
speed up the delivery of content that cannot be cached. In the case of a news
site, for example, where the content is constantly changing and only the
interface remains the same, the majority of the data is considered
“uncacheable.” Railgun addresses this issue by storing an image of the entire
web page. From there, the software collects only what has changed from the web
server and then sends the information back and forth to relay the updated
content.
