At Springbok Speed: Our First Data Center in Africa

Aug 24th 2015 product

“Ons het ons deure oopgemaak – die eerste datasentrum in Afrika. Jy kan nou Johannnesburg as jou voorkeurplek vir data kies” to our Afrikaans-savvy readers!

In case you missed it, Algolia is on a quest to make search faster than 50ms from anywhere in the world. To achieve this ambitious goal, we constantly need to expand our synchronized infrastructure. Yet, there was a missing piece to call our network coverage truly worldwide: Africa.

Today, we’re very happy to add Johannesburg, South Africa as our newest location and first data centre in Africa, where your data could be automatically replicated. We’re now covering 6 continents!

NORTH AMERICA: United States (East, West, Central), Canada
SOUTH AMERICA: Brazil
EUROPE: France, Germany, Russia
ASIA: Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore
OCEANIA: Australia
AFRICA: South Africa

This new addition is critical for our worldwide infrastructure network:

Prior to now nearly all Algolia traffic delivered to Africa was served from our French and Indian data centers. It now allows us to better serve our African customers by reducing network latency in this region thus ensuring an optimal find-as-you-type quality of service for their end users. This new location will also reinforces the high availability of Algolia’s search infrastructure by offering an extra backup location for the neighboring regions.

More importantly, Africa is quickly changing. Following a long period of strong growth and rapid urbanization, the continent is going digital at full speed. In 2013, Africa only had 16% Internet penetration and is now expected to reach 50% in the next ten years. Moreover, there are expected to be 360 million smartphones on the continent that will generate $75 billion in e-commerce revenue by 2025 (source: McKinsey).

That’s a tremendous opportunity for us to contribute to bridge the digital gap in Africa by bringing the Instant Search revolution to the new companies, products and services that will flourish there in the near future.

If you’re already using Algolia and want to migrate to the Africa region, simply drop us a line at support@algolia.com or on the live chat.

If you’re not using Algolia yet, give us a try (14-day trial, no credit card required) and select Johannesburg as your location.

About the author

Co-founder & board member at Algolia

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