Product Update: Sucuri Firewall in Sophia

Sucuri provides security for websites with the protection of our Web Application Firewall (WAF). We also have our proprietary Anycast content delivery network (CDN) that adds the performance benefits of a CDN to all our WAF users.

We been adding data centers in key regions of the world:

• San Jose – US
• Dallas – US
• Washington, D.C. – US
• Miami – US
• Chicago – US
• London – UK
• Frankfurt – Germany
• Amsterdam – Netherlands
• Sofia – Bulgaria
• Tokyo – Japan
• Singapore – Asia

As well as CDN Edges:

• São Paulo – Brazil
• Sydney – Australia

We are happy to announce the addition of our latest Point of Presence in a data center in Sophia – Bulgaria, it adds another layer of security and performance to all our customers located in Bulgaria/EMEA region.

If you are not familiar with Anycast, it is a network routing method where different data centers announce the same IP addresses, making them reachable at multiple destinations. When that happens, routers have multiple choices where to send your requests and they generally default to the one with the shortest distance (fewer hops). Because of this, Anycast greatly improves network connectivity and also gives websites the following benefits like:  geo load balancing, increased reliability (one data center can go down without affecting others), performance improvements and distributed response to DDoS attacks

Anycast Benefits

1. One of the most important benefits is the redundancy we can provide to the customer. If we experience some network or hardware error or downtime in one location, then that location will stop advertising that website. So instead of a site’s traffic going to that POP, it will automatically be routed to the next closest POP we have.
2. We can protect customer sites from attacks that can easily bring most hosting providers and many other networks down.
3. Flexibility. This relates back to number 1 on the list. But we can perform any type of upgrades or maintenance on any POP without the customer ever knowing.

In a nutshell, every POP is identical to another. They all advertise the same websites and advertise the same Anycast IP addresses.

In terms of distribution and connectivity, we have data centers in every major region on the planet. Each one provides DDoS mitigation, a CDN, and a WAF (with the exception of a few CDN edge-only locations). They are all connected to multiple tier 1 providers with large bandwidth availability to handle big DDoS attacks.

In the example below, you can see the performance of our network from a few cities:

This performance increase happens because of Anycast; our visitors are always routed to the data center closest to them. On average, you will get under 4ms round-trip/network connection time (ping tests) from any point in North America, Europe, and East Asia. We know that pings are not a definitive metric to measure site performance, but it shows how close our data centers are to most end users.

You can test the real web-loading performance of your site from around the world using our website performance tool.

If you have any questions about Anycast or our network infrastructure, let us know.