CloudFlare launches Sydney data centre

Website security and content delivery network provider CloudFlare has begun serving Australian and New Zealand customers out of a Sydney-based data centre for the first time.

Matthew Prince, chief executive and one of Cloudflare's founders, said in a blog post that the Sydney facility would provide lower latency over the Singapore or Los Angeles data centres previously used to serve local customers.

Latency times are expected to drop from in excess of 160 milliseconds to 30 to 40 milliseconds as a result, making time-sensitive applications more responsive.

The Sydney data centre is one of nine new facilities for the company, giving the company 23 facilities globally in total, and 70 percent more network capacity, according to Prince.

He said the cost of bandwidth in the region proved an issue in locating a data centre location in Australia but that the company had managed to strike a deal with a network provider — thought to be Asia Netcom — and obtained bandwidth at a more reasonable price.

The new data centre for Cloudflare is located in Equinix Australia's facility at Gardeners Road, Mascot, near Sydney's international airport.

Cloudflare is peering with Equinix over IPv4 at that exchange point.

Though independent ping tests over IPv4 corroborated Prince's claims of latency below 40 milliseconds, at time of writing CloudFlare appeared to be serving IPv6 traffic through its US servers, returning ping times of more than 140 milliseconds.

Prince founded CloudFlare in 2009 along with Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn, who previously had worked together on Project Honey Pot, a spam tracking system.

The service suffered a major compromise in June this year after hacking group UGNazi exploited a weakness in Google Apps and Gmail's authentication processes, gaining access to the site hosting internet forum 4Chan's message board.

UGNazi changed the DNS records and defaced the 4Chan site.