Photo from Unsplash

Originally Posted On: https://app.slack.com/client/T020Z0004TB/C020Z001265?selected_team_id=T020Z0004TB

Have you noticed a bump in speed and response time while playing lately? That’s because Bubble Shooter has been working hard to make sure that our players have a satisfying and fun experience. To improve our website’s performance, we’ve said goodbye to single-server hosting.

Instead, Bubble Shooter has chosen to switch our web hosting service to Cloudflare, an industry-leading company in cloud-based network services. Can you guess what happened next? It was a 150% increase in website speed—along with a few other upgrades we think you’ll be excited about.

Cloudflare has a global network of data centers. Their servers are located all over the world, which allows their content delivery network infrastructure to quickly serve content from servers close to the user’s geographic location. Wherever you log in to play Bubble Shooter, you won’t be stuck with slow loading times or unavailability.

In addition, Cloudflare serves as a reverse proxy, so it can cache and compress content, such as images and web pages, from servers that are closest to the user. As a result, you experience lightning-quick loading and response times without using up all your bandwidth.

Since switching our cache rate has become 90%. You don’t have to wait for the website to slowly comb through primary storage to find the data it’s looking for. You just have to be ready to play.

Having a large network of servers means that we can balance resources across multiple servers for stable traffic and uninterrupted use of the website. Cloudflare load balancers utilize algorithms to decide how the servers should route and distribute traffic. That way, the network infrastructure is optimized and each part is used efficiently. This helps Bubble Shooter have:

• High Availability
• Shorter Load Times
• Reduced Bandwith Usage
• Higher Fault Tolerance

With multiple servers, Cloudflare is able to balance the content across them at once. Your page will load in a flash, and there will be less latency while you play. This means you can have a more satisfying game experience, not to mention focus on where you want to land your next shot.

Cloudflare certainly helps support what happens on the back end of Bubble Shooter, but what about the players? There are two key things that moving Bubble Shooter to Cloudflare means.

You can kiss high latency goodbye. In addition to a website that works at three times the speed, players will be excited to know that the website’s latency went from 700 ms to 70 ms. So no matter the level of traffic on the website, our players will experience quick reaction times.

You won’t be waiting for a page to load or for a new game to start, either. The Bubble Shooter website now has an average loading time of 1.3 seconds.

Since Cloudflare is a reverse proxy, it sits between the site servers and your device. That isn’t the only thing that Cloudflare does to keep your data secure. There are three things that make Cloudflare a great choice to protect the security of our systems and our users.

• SSL Offloading
• Web Application Firewall
• Single Point of Entry
• Optimized DNS Settings

SSL and TLS encryption and decryption take a lot of resources away from the functionality of a website. Cloudflare can offload this heavy task across multiple servers so servers can prioritize making your gaming experience fast and fun during high website usage.

The web application firewall is an additional layer of security that protects against vulnerabilities, like DDoS attacks. These types of cyber attacks flood the servers with requests and keep players from being able to play the game. Cloudflare filters the traffic to ensure that there is uninterrupted availability no matter what.

Cloudflare IP addresses are returned as DNS queries—cloaking the IP address of the original server. In addition, Cloudflare acts as a single point of entry, reducing the amount of servers that need to be exposed to the internet. This simplifies network communications and provides strong security for Bubble Shooter players.

They say that two heads are better than one. Well, that goes for servers, too. A global network of servers is certainly better than single-server web hosting.

Switching to Cloudflare gives Bubble Shooter a global platform to provide users with an enjoyable game that is challenging and fun at the same time. The best part of all of this is that it’s all scaleable—which means more good things to come from Bubble Shooter. Now all that’s left for you is to win the new high score!