As we're now just a few weeks away from the new year we thought now is a good time to go through some of the milestones from this year.

If you would like to view the specific features we added or enhanced this year we recommend taking a look at our November 2018 newsletter. It's a great read and all of the changes listed within the newsletter link to blog post entries for more detail.

This year we saw impressive growth, at one point the volume of API queries we were receiving was doubling every month and we had to upgrade not just our API but our server hardware a few times to keep up with the projected demand. We also enhanced our network infrastructure significantly by using a world-wide Virtual Private Network (VPN) through our Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider which reduced latency for customers who are the furthest away from our servers.

As we mentioned above we upgraded our API several times. In-fact we launched our v2 API in January 2018 and since then the adoption rate has been incredible, we've updated you a few times on these numbers and today we're seeing 91% of all customers using the v2 API for their queries. This is up from 72% back in July.

In addition to launching the v2 API at the start of this year we also upgraded the API several times throughout the year reducing query latency by enormous amounts. You may remember when v2 launched its main feature was the ability to check multiple IP Addresses in a single query allowing efficient batch processing.

At the time the efficiency wasn't as high as it needed to be so we could only allow 100 IP's to be checked simultaneously and that could take up-to 90 seconds in some cases with all our checks enabled. In February we raised that limit to 1,000 and then in August we raised it again to 10,000. These kinds of improvements were made possible by redesigning core parts of the API to remove bottlenecks. Today you can check 10,000 IP's in around 25 seconds.

Even while we added more data to the API including improved provider, country and ASN information, the addition of IPv6 data and most recently, city, longitude and latitude data we've been able to increase performance. In-fact we now track more datacenter providers and more proxies than ever before and we spend more machine hours than ever processing incoming queries through our inference engine and yet the API is faster today than ever before.

Going into 2019 we intend to invest even more heavily in our unique technology. We recently did an infrastructure deep dive which resulted in a large influx of questions to our support staff from people wanting to know more and we intend to follow this up with an architecture overview breaking down some of our custom tools next year, stay tuned for that.

This year we also spent a lot of time improving the tools customers have to use on our website. We improved our Dashboard API's, we improved the web interface page several times and we introduced the new threats page. We also invested heavily in the customer dashboard making it more performative, improving the appearance, adding two-factor security and other enhancements. We'll keep improving this next year too.

So that's what happened with us this year, huge growth, lots of improvements to the site and our service. We want to thank all of the customers that took the time to try our service and we're especially thankful to those of you who took the time to write to us with ideas and suggestions, that input has often been invaluable, in-fact a lot of the features listed in our November newsletter were born from ideas pitched to us directly by customers.

We hope everyone has an enjoyable festive period and a great new year. We'll be making one last blog post directly after this one for our holiday support times so make sure to check that out, apart from that you should next hear from us in January 2019!