CloudFlare and CloudFlare - Railgun Frequently Asked Questions
What is CloudFlare?
CloudFlare is a third party service that we offer to our hosting customers. CloudFlare provides performance, security and availability enhancement. CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network where they automatically cache static content, filter malicious traffic and help offload big spikes in traffic. A typical site loads faster and uses 65% fewer server resources. The biggest gains are to web site visitors coming from outside the United States. Chances are good that content delivery will occur from a server closer to where they are.
You can sign up for a free CloudFlare account directly from the cPanel control panel. This is the best way to create an account. Free Cloudflare accounts can contain up to 5 web sites.
What is Railgun?
Railgun is a WAN (wide area network) optimization technology that we offer our hosting customers in partnership with a company called CloudFlare.
CloudFlare’s Railgun technology greatly speeds up the delivery of non-cached pages. While CloudFlare automatically caches 65% of the resources needed to make up a page, 35% can't be cached because the resources are dynamically generated or marked as 'do not cache'. That 35% is often the initial HTML of the page that must be downloaded first. CloudFlare Railgun speeds this remaining 35%.
What are the benefits of Railgun?
Websites running Railgun show a 143% improvement in HTML load times and a 90% decrease in Time To First Byte (TTFB) responses.
How does Railgun work?
Railgun opens a secure, tunneled connection between the CloudFlare network and your origin server where the connection only sends differences from the last request. This is similar to how video encoding works.
The markup of websites does not change that frequently from one request to the next. Instead of transferring the entire request between CloudFlare and the origin server, Railgun will transfer only the changes in markup from one request to the next. This cuts down on bandwidth, transfer time, and overall page load times. Railgun caches these differences in memory to make page processing as fast as possible.
What kind of sites can use Railgun?
Any website can benefit from the performance improvements Railgun offers, especially dynamic sites.
What much does Railgun cost?
If you purchase Railgun directly through CloudFlare, it costs $200 per month. However, we are offering Railgun to our customers for FREE !
How do I enable Railgun on my site?
- Log in to cPanel
- Find and click on the CloudFlare icon
- If you are not yet signed up with CloudFlare you can do so at this point.
- Click on Statistics and Settings
- Scroll down and find Railgun - select a rail gun instance (there may be only one)
- Next to the Railgun drop down, there is a box which will say "off". Change it to "on"
What if I’m having issues enabling Railgun?
If you experience issues when enabling Railgun, please create a help ticket. Be sure to include details.
I’m not a CloudFlare customer, can I still use Railgun?
No. You need to be a CloudFlare customer in order to use Railgun.
I’m seeing an error on my site and I think Railgun is causing it, what should I do?
If you are using Railgun via cPanel, you can turn it off directly from your control panel. Otherwise, log into your CloudFlare account, go to Performance Settings and turn Railgun off from there. Please file a bug report with a detailed description here.
