Both Toronto and Canada punch above their demographic weight when it comes to Internet activity. As evidenced by our eager involvement in everything from Facebook to Flickr (Toronto has some of the highest participation rates on both platforms), we are a city and a country that has embraced the digital world enthusiastically.
Hoping to make that online experience better is
CloudFlare, a company that provides web optimization to its thousands of clients, and which opened its first Canadian data centre in Toronto this month.
CloudFlare provides a suite of tools and services that help its clients' websites run more effectively and efficiently: everything from improving page load times to providing detailed analytics to blocking malicious attacks, says Joshua Motta, who is in charge of special projects for CloudFlare. For instance, CloudFlare will take information from client servers (think larger files that can slow a website down, like images) and set it up at their distributed data centres; when you load that client's website, some of the information is coming from CloudFlare's local data centre, making the page load more quickly for you and reducing strain on the client's servers.
Canada, says the company, is their seventh largest source of traffic worldwide. Considering the size of our population, that's substantial. The downtown Toronto data centre will help CloudFlare better serve Canadian web users, which are concentrated, unsurprisingly, in the GTA.
"Where we locate our data centres is typically in the most critical data centre of any given region," says Motta, "because that is where there is the greatest connectivity."
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Joshua Motta, Special Projects, CloudFlare