American content delivery network Cloudflare – one of the largest CDNs in the world - is set to considerably expand its global reach, starting with Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

The company will be leasing data center space from an unnamed provider, hoping to increase access speeds for six million websites, applications and cloud services.

Cloudflare has also announced a new Point-of-Presence (PoP) in Quito, Equador, and more additions are expected to be made public in the coming days.

Cradle of civilization

Cloudflare’s CDN sits between the end-user and the service provider. By caching content on its own servers and placing it closer to the edge of the network, it can improve availability for websites and applications, decrease page loading times and protect against DDoS attacks.

The company’s network is linked into 150 Internet exchanges - that’s more Internet exchange points than any other network in the world.

And it’s set to grow even bigger: Cloudflare is in the middle of an expansion, looking to open 14 new PoPs across five continents. It will start with Yerevan, a city of more than a million people located in the Ararat plain in South Caucasus.

Yerevan is one of the oldest continously inhabited cities in the world, with more than 28 centuries of written history.

Cloudflare will move its equipment into one of the local data centers, which will become its 37th facility in Asia, and its 103rd globally. The company expects to shave off around 30 milliseconds of latency for local users accessing services that rely on its network.

Following Yerevan, Cloudflare will launch a PoP in Quito, arranged in partnership with the NAP.EC Internet exchange.

The company hasn’t explicitly stated where it will go next, but the target for the next stage of expansion is likely Rome, judging by this short quote from head of Infrastructure Strategy Nitin Rao: “All roads lead to the home of our next data center.”