Massive congratulations to the CloudFlare team for managing to open not 1 but 17 data centres in China. The approach they have followed is very interesting and I find it encouraging that a company of this size is happy to share their experience of the whole process.

The below excerpt shows the great performance increase companies which server content within China could see a result of this partnership and market penetration.

The performance benefits of our China expansion are staggering. We are now able to reduce the time to serve a request from outside of China by over 200ms. Across the span of a single day, the time savings for all the requests served inside China across the CloudFlare and Yunjiasu services collectively saves more than 240 years of time that Chinese Internet users would otherwise have to wait for websites to load. Moreover, website availability in China for sites served on the China network has nearly doubled. These benefits will only increase as we begin to serve more customers across the China network.

Source: How We Extended CloudFlare’s Performance and Security Into Mainland China