Rather than caching at the object level, CloudFlare Railgun caches content down to the individual bytes within an object
Web performance and security company CloudFlare announced on Tuesday that its next generation web optimization protocol, Railgun, is now available from more than 25 web hosting provider partners.
Rather than caching at the object level, Railgun caches content down to the individual bytes within an object. Doing this is a way to cache dynamic content out of the edge in a safe way, Michelle Zatlyn, CloudFlare co-founder and head of user experience says in a phone call with the WHIR.
“CloudFlare’s core CDN technology on average caches about 65 percent, so it’s all this static content like images, CSS and Javascript, but that leaves 35 percent of the page that’s uncacheable,” Zatlyn says. “It’s uncacheable because it’s either highly personalized content or because the server marked it as do not cache. What Railgun does is speed up that remaining 35 percent of the page in a safe way.”
CloudFlare introduced Railgun at HostingCon in July, but at that point it was only available to business users and a small bunch of web hosts for testing. Now web hosts can integrate Railgun into their control panel and either turn it on by default for customers using CloudFlare, or give customers the option to switch Railgun on or off.
Now, web hosts including A2 Hosting, Bluehost, DreamHost, DreamHost, HostPapa, and (mt) Media Temple offer Railgun to customers through a single click and without any software installation or code changes.
“Railgun is a perfect addition to the benefits of our high-performance SwiftServer platform,” Bryan Muthig, CEO of A2 Hosting said in a statement. “We recently added SSD hosting, which improves page loads up to 300 percent over standard drive. For an even faster hosting experience, we’re turning on Railgun for free for all SSD hosting customers.”
CloudFlare also released packages that make it easy for Rackspace and Amazon Web Services customers to install Railgun.
“It’s this next-generation performance that was previously unthinkable. As you get more API calls, and the type of the content on the web becomes more personalized, it becomes more and more important,” Zatlyn says.
Talk back: Are you part of CloudFlare’s Optimized Hosting Provider program? Are you offering CloudFlare Railgun technology to your customers? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
