Martin J Levy, writing on the Cloudflare blog:

We are especially excited to announce our Kathmandu data center while attending APRICOT conference, being held in Nepal this year. The event, supported by APNIC, the local Regional Internet address Registry (RIR) for the Asia-Pacific region, attracts leaders from Internet industry technical, operational, and policy-making communities. Cloudflare’s favorite part of APRICOT is the Peering Forum track on Monday.

Come for the announcement, stay for the flag dimensions’ nerdy.

Cloudflare Gets Ready for a Massive Expansion in 2018 with Two New Data Centers in India

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, announces their 120th data center in Salt Lake City, Utah and says the company has planned a “massive expansion” for 2018.

We have big plans. By the end of the year, we’re forecasting that we’ll have facilities in 200 cities and 100 countries worldwide. Twelve months from now we expect that 95% of the world’s population will live in a country with a Cloudflare data center.

In the post linked above, I noticed the network map includes five (maybe six) dots for India.

Cloudflare Network Map for India

Cloudflare Network Map for India

This includes the three existing Cloudflare data centers in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, which the company launched in November 2015. The fourth dot, seen in Orange, looks like a new data center in progress in or around Nagpur in central India. Similarly, the fifth dot, seen in teal here looks like a new data center in or close to Bengaluru planned for sometime in 2018. It also looks like Cloudflare will be launching a new data center in Nepal.

As someone who lives in Mumbai and builds websites for clients — the majority of whom are located in the Indian subcontinent, I’m incredibly excited about all this.

Literally all of the popular iXyr Media websites, including this one, are powered by the amazing CloudFlare architecture. There is tremendous value that CloudFlare gives out for Free and I couldn’t be happier with the product. A few days ago, CloudFlare made this big announcement that has long been my only feature request to them:

India is home to 400 million Internet users, second only to China, and will add more new users this year than any other country in the world. CloudFlare protects and accelerates 4 million websites, mobile apps and APIs, and is trusted by over 10,000 new customers each day. Combine these forces, and we are positioned to connect hundreds of millions of Indian users with the millions of Internet applications they use each day.

Today, we accelerate this momentum with the announcement of three new points of presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi. These new sites represent the 66th, 67th and 68th data centers respectively across our global network.

They didn’t just announce a POP in India, they went all out and announced three of them.

As of this moment, our data centers in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi are serving all CloudFlare customer content in under 50 milliseconds to users across the entire Indian subcontinent, about 7 times faster than the blink of an eye. And we’re not done yet—we’re still making tweaks to further decrease latency.

As someone whose sole livelihood depends on building and running websites, this is the best thing to happen this year.