AdGuard

AdGuard drops bandwidth costs while providing a faster service by using Cloudflare.

Adguard focuses on enabling organizations to gain control of service delivery, simplify service management processes, acquire real-time visibility across their services and infrastructure, and orchestrate the interactions of people, process, and technology for optimum service performance.

AdGuard’s Challenges: Speed, Availability and High Bandwidth

As AdGuard grew and expanded its presence, the team wanted to ensure that every user, regardless of location, was enjoying the same high speed, highly available service. With users all around the world AdGuard began to realize that the geographic dispersal of some of these users negatively impacted their experience with the product. Andrey Meshkov, CTO and Co-Founder of AdGuard noted “the experience for most of our users, especially in Europe where we’re based, was really great, but for others our servers were too far away. Additionally, we realized that some of our global users were experiencing connectivity problems with contacting our servers. Discovering our site was unavailable or slow performing for some of our users was the key moment when our need for a CDN service became apparent.”

A third challenge AdGuard faced was delivering the best Ad blocking possible to their users, while balancing the bandwidth costs it face as a result of doing so. Meshkov explained, “Ad blockers’ work by using special “filters” or lists of ad blocking rules that tell what should be blocked and where. To ensure high ad blocking quality, it is crucial to receive filters updates as soon and as fast as possible. In turn, this speed and frequency costs quite a lot of bandwidth.”

AdGuard’s Solution: The Fastest, Largest Network with Flat-Rate Prices

“We considered a couple of Cloudflare’s competitors,” continued Meshkov, “but none of them compared to Cloudflare’s price and network size or ease-of-use and ease-of-setup.” Today, AdGuard uses Cloudflare’s CDN to cache and serve their website content, newest ad filters, and latest program updates. By serving content, like their filters and updates, from Cloudflare’s data centers in 330+ cities, AdGuard was able to shave down their bandwidth bill despite serving over 150 TBs worth of data and offer their users a faster service. “Cloudflare significantly improves website load time for all of our users,” Meshkov delighted. “Even for users in Europe, where the performance was already good the difference was significant — the site halved in load time. For our US users, it was even better: a 4x improvement in speed. Plus, the faster load times improved our search rankings bringing more leads and users to our business.”

As an added bonus, Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation has been able to block every attack that AdGuard has seen. “Though we weren’t looking for a security product, we experienced a couple of DDoS attacks and Cloudflare really helped to block those.”