Algolia, a San Francisco-based startup that provides search functionality for websites as a service, until recently headquartered in Paris, has expanded its data center infrastructure into Asia to improve its service to companies in the region.

Its co-founder CEO Nicolas Dessaigne said the new site is in Singapore, which enables it to serve customers in China, Japan and Australia. “We wanted to get something better over there,” he said.

Algolia offers a fast search capability through an API (application programming interface) developers can easily integrate into websites and pay for on a monthly basis.

The company rents dedicated servers from OVH Hosting in data centers in Montreal and Roubaix, a city in the north of France. Dessaigne declined to say which provider the company is using in Singapore.

Its architecture consists of three-server clusters. The servers are powered by 3Ghz or faster CPUs and use solid state drives for storage.

The company has multiple such clusters in each Canada and France locations and one in Singapore.

Julien Lemoine, co-founder and CTO, explained that the company had developed ability for its search to work in a number of Asian languages but had not actually planned to open a data center in the region this early. “We thought the API as a service market was less mature in Asia than it is in the US or Europe,” he wrote in a blog post.

After Chinese technology news website 36 Krypton featured the company in an article, dozens of customers from China signed up. “We got more sign-ups from China in the past month than from Canada,” Lemoine wrote.

Algolia tries to keep its search response times lower than 100ms and has been successful at it with users in North America and Europe. Before the Singapore data center was launched, however, its latency in Asia was between 200ms and 300ms.

Because Asia's hosting market is different from Europe and North America, renting servers there is a lot more expensive. To compensate, Algolia had to add a premium on plans that use the Singapore data center, Lemoine wrote.