Even though our team and biggest customers are based in the United States, our userbase is becoming increasingly global. Last month we had users from 131 countries use the service. And even our US-based users often exchange files with global vendors or customers.

A big part of our mission at BrickFTP is to increase workplace productivity -- no matter where that workplace is located. So early this year, our infrastructure team launched an internal project to dramatically improve file transfer speeds for our South American, European, Asian, and Australian users.

Today, I'm excited to announce the launch of BrickFTP Global, a huge improvement to our infrastructure that will increase file transfer speeds by up to 10x for users in South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

We've created new edge server locations in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Ireland, Sao Paolo, Frankfurt, and Los Angeles, each with accelerated persistent connections to the BrickFTP core storage facility in Virginia, USA.

With BrickFTP Global your international users will connect directly to these regional endpoints rather than directly to our Virginia servers. The reduced TCP latency of the regional connection will dramatically increase file upload and download speeds by up to 10x. BrickFTP Global works for all supported connection types: HTTP/Web, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and WebDAV.

We use latency-based DNS technology to ensure that your users always connect to the fastest regional endpoint.

No changes are required on your end to achieve the new faster speeds provided by BrickFTP Global, but we will be rolling it out slowly to ensure a smooth launch.

We will be activating BrickFTP Global for all of our customers over the course of the first two weeks of October. We will send you another email once BrickFTP Global has been activated for your account.

And the best part? BrickFTP Global is an absolutely free feature on your account.

We hope that BrickFTP Global will be a major boost to the productivity of you and your team.

A Quick Note About Compliance

We recognize that many BrickFTP users are in various regulated industries, so I need to mention a few nitty gritty details. The physical servers at the new BrickFTP Global edge locations are operated by Amazon Web Services, the exact same upstream provider that we use for our United States locations. They also run the exact same software as the main BrickFTP hosting location. The BrickFTP Global edge locations are only used for temporary file storage (approximately up to 24 hours) and no files are permanently stored there.

With that said, the mere fact that these servers are located in foreign countries does mean that we (or Amazon) could now be forced to comply with a legal demand from the governments of those countries to turn over things such as activity logs or potentially even file contents. While we consider it highly unlikely that any of these particular foreign governments would send us an abusive demand, we understand that even temporarily storing files in a foreign jurisdiction is a problem for some of our customers due to regulations.

So we've built an opt-out mechanism that would allow you to prevent the BrickFTP Global system from being enabled for your account. If you would like to opt-out, please email support@brickftp.com before October 1 and we will ensure that your site is opted-out. Any site for which we have a HIPAA BAA signed will be opted out automatically.

We will also soon push revisions to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that incorporate this information about BrickFTP Global.

Also, due to IPv4 availability, BrickFTP Global will be disabled by default for any customer with a custom SSL certificate. If you are interested in using BrickFTP Global in combination with a Custom SSL Certificate, please contact us to learn about your options.