GoCache is an up-and-coming CDN based in Brazil currently focused on the Brazilian market, particularly small and medium-sized businesses. It was founded in 2013. GoCache spent several years concentrated on building their platform after receiving seed funding from VCs. They currently have 5 PoPS (four in Brazil and one in Miami), but will have a dozen by the end of July 2018, mostly in Brazil. Anycast is up and running and GoCache has its own networking stack. They currently have 200+ customers and 5,000+ websites on their platform.
GoCache’s Products include:
- Caching Content – its servers store a copy of the entire content of its websites in cache to be delivered to visitors based on their geography, connecting them to the nearest server, thereby reducing latency.
- Static and Dynamic Content – GoCache caches both types of content: static, including HTML files, images or JavaScript resources, which don’t need to be generated, modified or processed on delivery to the end user; and dynamic content, meaning content that regularly changes, such as on an eCommerce site. GoCache has been investing heavily in different features of dynamic content.
- DSA – GoCache has customized dynamic site acceleration, which lets you cache HTML or HTTP and significantly improve the performance of web pages with dynamic content. You can combine criteria according to your URLs, allowing you to use the same URL with different content cached according to the content type, thereby reducing latency and improving performance.
- WAF – GoCache offers a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect your site against hackers and web vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection. GoCache is constantly evolving its WAF to offer new features allowing you to apply a set of rules for an HTTP conversation to protect your application against common attacks. The GoCache WAF has a lot of flexibility: it can be customized by a vast amount of different criteria to allow different behaviors in different parts of the application.
- Machine Learning – GoCache offers Web Performance Optimization (WPO, employing various machine learning techniques to improve the download speed and display of web pages in your browser. GoCache has an exclusive technology for this called SmartCache, which caches the dynamic parts of your site or virtual store. It allows you to create flexible rules with SmartRules to cache content that may be seen as “incase” by other CDNs. SmartRules can be configured based on various criteria, such as cookies, URL or an HTTP method. The order of the rules determines its priority.
- DDoS Protection – GoCache offers transparent DDoS protection. If the customer notices a DDoS or syn flood attack on their site and asks for GoCache’s protection, GoCache will mitigate it. If the customer sees it in their event logs in their control panel, however, they can directly mitigate it. GoCache offers a simple firewall and a more flexible firewall. The more flexible firewall utilizes a CAPTCHA challenge and customizes when it will be shown according to different criteria. In addition, the same way you can combine different criteria for caching, you can do the same for the firewall, allowing you to create your own rules about what traffic is allowed to pass through and what should be blocked.
- Support for Syslog – GoCache has recently added support to syslog, allowing customers to import all their logs from the CDN and generate any graphics it wishes to.
- Real Time Analytics – the CDN offers real time analytics to help with capacity planning, troubleshooting and improving cache efficiency for your application and surrounding hosting infrastructure.
- Rest-based Public API – GoCache offers an API that can be used across its entire platform. Those of its customers that are web hosting only never access their control panel, but rather run things through API (every GoCache feature can be configured and modified through its API). They also consume the analytics through API without their customers knowing who is behind them. Additionally, GoCache’s API allows for the instant purge of the objects stored in GoCache’s servers so that your site’s information stays relevant.
The Brazilian Market and CDN Usage
CDN penetration in Brazil is overall not as high as in the U.S., in particular further down the business pyramid. In a recent study conducted by GoCache, they found that adoption at the top of the Brazilian market in the most visited 1,000 websites, is similar to the U.S., sitting at around 70%. However, at the next tier of the next 10,000 websites, adoption rates in Brazil are currently at around 30% compared to 50-60% in the U.S. At the bottom 90,000, adoption rates are even lower – at around 13% in Brazil compared to approximately 30% in the U.S.
GoCache is therefore targeting those medium and small sized businesses who haven’t yet adopted a CDN. They are currently getting a lot of their customers from AWS; AWS is expanding rapidly in Brazil, in particular, taking over the hosting market. As a byproduct, AWS is educating the market place as to the value of a CDN service. However, GoCache can cater to the local CDN market better as they’re local, have more PoPs in place in the region (Amazon only has two in Brazil currently) and the local CDN offers significantly cheaper pricing. The Brazilian company also has features that allow for easy integration with AWS if customers wish to do so.
South America is the next region for GoCache, then this thriving startup plans to go global. Next year, it will be targeting around $5-10M in its Series A funding route, which it will use to power global expansion to other parts of South America, then Europe, the U.S. and Asia. Watch this space.
