1. 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 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%.
2. 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.
3. 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 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.
4. What kind of sites can use Railgun?
Any website can benefit from the performance improvements Railgun offers, especially dynamic sites.
5. 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 only $1/mo.
6. How do I enable Railgun on my site?
Simply login to the billing and support portal at http://my.iwfhosting.net. Click on Services > My Services. Click on "View Details" next to your shared or reseller package you wish to have Railguns associated with. Click Management Actions > Upgrade/Downgrade Options and select "CloudFlare + RailGuns".
7. What if I’m having issues enabling Railgun?
If you experience issues when enabling Railgun, please contact us via the helpdesk at http://my.iwfhosting.net or send an email to [email protected]
8. I’m not a CloudFlare customer, can I still use Railgun?
No. You need to be a CloudFlare customer in order to use Railgun.
9. 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
10. Remind me, what is CloudFlare?
