Taringa!

Dedicated to helping people to share, discover, and find new ideas, Taringa! is the largest user generated content platform born and raised in Latin America. This social publishing platform allows over 60 million users to share their opinions, interests and experiences democratically and without censorship.

Since Taringa!’s birth in 2004, the site experienced an exponential growth, with top markets in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, and the US Hispanic community. As its user base continues to expand, Taringa! executives started looking for a way to ensure a fast and reliable online experience.

Expanding with Cloudflare’s Global Network

“We were looking for a performance and security company that was aggressively expanding their network in countries where most of our users live”, said Nicolás Cohen, CTO at Taringa!. With a global network of data centers in over 330 cities, Cloudflare has a heavy presence in Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Perú, Chile, Colombia, Spain, as well as the US.

“I read about Cloudflare in Ars Technica”, remembers Cohen, “and I was particularly impressed when they thwarted the biggest DDoS attack in Internet history. If you add that to the amount of presence they have in Latin America, the choice was simple”.

Since moving their application onto Cloudflare in 2015, Taringa! has made good use of Cloudflare’s global caching to dramatically decrease load times and save over 80% on monthly bandwidth costs. “We serve 500 TB of image traffic through Cloudflare every month to over 60 million users”, explains Juan Chimienti, Taringa!’s Head of Site Performance & Reliability. “The vast majority of that traffic is served from their edge so it’s fast and keeps the number of requests to our origin servers low.”

The overall availability of the site improved not only on the good days but also on the bad ones. “By using Cloudflare we are literally closer to our users, and this gives us the ability to see networking issues that were affecting even a small portion of our users and fix it” says Juan.

One of Taringa!’s biggest concerns was the potential overhead they might incur for having one more hop between their users and the uncached data. However, Juan noted that “we noticed that the network response time in Argentina was not affected at all and was actually improved in other parts of the continent.”

Another benefit Taringa! experienced with Cloudflare’s solution is how easy it is to implement encryption. This not only makes communication more secure, it also allows Taringa! to take advantage of all the performance features of HTTP/2 with no configuration on their end. “Knowing that we can count on Cloudflare’s scale with our customer growth allows us to think freely about solutions for problems that were previously unsolvable for us.”