Summary

Thanks to our recent partnership with Cloudflare, we are able to bring all the benefits of Cloudflare's global low latency network directly to our customers in a quick and simple to use fashion. We have integrated our full suite of layer 7 filtering, load balancing, and caching capabilities directly to the addon, meaning you as a server owner get to benefit from all of TCPShield's native features in addition to Cloudflare's low latency routing.

What does this mean for server owners? If you are running a community based in Oceania, Asia, South America, or more, you can now benefit from TCPShield's additional filtering locations in addition to Cloudflare's Argo smart routing, which is enabled by default on all our regional and global tunnels.

Feature-set overview

By enabling the addon, your CNAME is placed onto our proprietary infrastructure that combines Cloudflare spectrum with our globally distributed layer 7 filtering suite. Currently, we can provide sub 1ms backend latency to the following geographies:

• Seattle, USA

• Los Angeles, USA

• Chicago, USA

• New York, USA

• Amsterdam, Netherlands

• Frankfurt, Germany

• Tokyo, Japan

• Singapore, Singapore

• Sydney, Australia

In the coming weeks, we will also be supporting backends in the following locations:

• Sao Paulo, Brazil

• Delhi, India

Geo routing is performed automatically at Cloudflare's edge in addition to our proprietary routing engine that sits directly behind Cloudflare Spectrum's services, to ensure users are matched with the closest layer 7 scrubbing center. For customers who would like their tunnel geographically static, such as having all traffic terminate in Frankfurt, you may contact us to enable such functionality as well.

Billing

Currently, all plans Pro and above may access the Cloudflare addon. Pricing schedule is as follows:

For bulk bandwidth arrangements of 25TB or greater, please contact us.

To enable the feature, you must have a minimum of $5 credit added to your account. You can do this by depositing via the Billing -> Overview section, with the desired payment method of your choosing. Once you have funded your account, you may enable the network via the Domains section of your selected network, from there your network will be placed onto our premium CNAME where all traffic from that point forward flows over Cloudflare. No further configuration required. In the event your account balance runs low, you will automatically be debited for the last seven days of premium bytes used.

Refunds for excess credit may be requested at any time. Simply let us know via a ticket which payment method you would like the credit re-reimbursed to.

Performance

One of our early adopters, Minemen Club Asia, saw as much as 30% latency reduction for users in the South East Asia region utilizing Cloudflare. As network traffic traverses from Cloudflare's edge datacenters to origin servers, it first selects the optimal carrier to forward outbound traffic.

This is done in both combination of well configured BGP routing at Cloudflare's edge in addition to their proprietary Argo routing solution, which establishes two-way GRE tunnels (n^2) to each Cloudflare point of presence where dynamic path selection is performed through the public internet as well as Cloudflare's private network infrastructure. This helps alleviate network bottlenecks frequently caused by unfavorable network conditions on the public internet such as overloaded links as well as maintenance. The resulting TCP connection then terminates at the closest location to the origin. More info on Argo here.