Trustbank

Cloudflare helps Trustbank reduce server costs by 90% and improve site performance

Trustbank is the operator of "Furusato Choice", a charitable donation site aligned with Japan’s “hometown tax” program. The site allows users to make tax-deductible donations to municipalities across Japan to support various development initiatives—all as a part of Trustbank’s mission of "creating an independent and sustainable region."

Since this program's inception in April of 2012, Trustbank staff have brought people, supplies, money, and information to such regions and circulated them within the regions while also developing various businesses under the banner of "joint regional development" in order to create an independent and sustainable region.

Expanding from CDN to additional services

Trustbank handles a wide variety of information on its hometown tax donation site. This includes payment data, which is always a serious security consideration. In addition, the site was being run without a Content Delivery Network (CDN) because it was read-only, initially. So when site traffic started increasing, Trustbank began searching for a CDN solution that could be used on a trial basis.

At that point, they were introduced to Cloudflare. Trustbank’s business was still small in scale when they first tried Cloudflare, so they began with a free plan. Based on the free plan’s performance, they soon expanded into using additional services for security—such as Cloudflare Advanced DDoS Protection—and performance—such as Load Balancing, Cloudflare Rules, and Argo Smart Routing (the latter of which finds the lowest-latency paths for origin-server-bound traffic).

Trustbank especially appreciates how these services come together in Cloudflare’s unified dashboard. Controlling features, obtaining insight from domain security and cache analytics, and sharing account access can be set from any device through the dashboard's design. It also features an intuitive, easy-to-understand UI. Trustbank says that they are checking on the status of its blocking performance several times per month.

Improved performance and reduced server costs

Since adopting Cloudflare, Trustbank has been successful at blocking illegal site access, using procedures like access blocking, communication blocking and country blocking. And since the Cloudflare CDN handles more that 90% of requests, the number of servers Trustbank requires has been reduced to 1/10th of its original number.

The Cloudflare CDN in particular has multiple benefits. On the performance side, Trustbank reports overall content delivery speed increases, along with improvements in smartphone image conversion. These improvements have a direct impact on user satisfaction. In addition, serving content through the CDN results in reduced traffic to Trustbank’s origins servers. This shift has helped Trustbank save on server costs.

Cloudflare support allows for customization

Since the beginning of the relationship Trustbank has frequently used Cloudflare’s enterprise support services. While this service was only available in English when they first adopted Cloudflare, it is now available in Japanese as well, and Trustbank says they have been entirely satisfied with the service they received.

Trustbank continues to contribute to regions throughout Japan. They will continue to provide support for these regions together with local governments nationwide.