What is Railgun?
Railgun is a WAN optimization technology that we offer our hosting customers in partnership with a company called CloudFlare.
CloudFlare’s Railgun technology significantly 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 cache because the resources are dynamically generated or marked as 'do not cache.' That 35% is often the first HTML of the page that must download first. CloudFlare Railgun speeds this remaining 35%.
What are the benefits of Railgun?
A website running Railgun shows 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 host’s origin server where the connection only sends differences from the last request. This technique 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 optimization cuts down on bandwidth, transmission 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?
We have partnered with CloudFlare to make Railgun both easy and affordable. If you purchase Railgun directly through CloudFlare, it costs $200/month. However, we have partnered with CloudFlare and are offering Railgun to our customers for no additional fee.
How do I enable Railgun on my site?
If Mediaura set up your account on CloudFlare, then the Railgun will be enabled as part of this process. If you setup CloudFlare on your own, just submit a support request at https://support.mediaura.com to ask that we turn on Railgun for your website.
What if I’m having issues enabling Railgun?
If you experience problems when configuring Railgun, please open a ticket at https://support.mediaura.com, and we will help you resolve the issue.
I’m not a CloudFlare customer, can I still use Railgun?
No. You need to be a CloudFlare customer to use Railgun.
I see 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 at https://support.cloudflare.com/anonymous_requests/new, or you can let us know at https://support.mediaura.com, and we will open a ticket with CloudFlare as needed.
Remind me, what is CloudFlare?
CloudFlare is a third party service that we offer to our hosting customers. CloudFlare provides performance, security, and availability of web properties. CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network where they automatically cache static content, filter malicious traffic and help offload significant spikes in traffic. On average, a site loads twice as fast uses 65% fewer server resources and has an additional layer of security.