CloudFlare Railgun FAQ

1. What is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a third-party service that we offer to our hosting customers. CloudFlare provides performance, security, and availability to web properties. CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network that automatically caches static content, filters malicious traffic, and helps manage large traffic spikes. On average, a website loads twice as fast, uses 65% fewer server resources, and has an additional layer of security.

2. What is Railgun?

Railgun is a WAN optimization technology that we offer to our hosting customers in collaboration with a company called CloudFlare.

CloudFlare’s Railgun technology significantly accelerates the delivery of non-cached pages. While CloudFlare automatically caches 65% of the resources needed to compose a page, the remaining 35% cannot be cached because the resources are dynamically generated or marked as "do not cache." That 35% is usually the initial HTML of the page that must be downloaded first. CloudFlare’s Railgun speeds up this remaining 35%.

3. What are the benefits of Railgun?

Websites using Railgun see a 143% improvement in HTML load times and a 90% reduction in Time to First Byte (TTFB) responses.

4. How does Railgun work?

Railgun establishes a secure, tunneled connection between CloudFlare’s network and your hosting provider’s origin server, where the connection only sends the differences from the last request. This is similar to how video encoding works.

The structure of web pages does not change frequently from one request to the next. Instead of transferring the entire request between CloudFlare and the origin server, Railgun transfers only the structural changes from one request to the next. This reduces bandwidth usage, transfer time, and overall page load times. Railgun stores these differences in memory to process pages as quickly as possible.

5. What types of websites can use Railgun?

Any website can benefit from the performance improvements offered by Railgun, especially dynamic websites.

6. How much does Railgun cost?

We have partnered with CloudFlare to make Railgun easy and affordable. If you purchase Railgun directly from CloudFlare, it costs $200/month. However, we have partnered with CloudFlare and offer Railgun for free to our customers.

7. How can I activate Railgun on my website?

Getting started is very easy: simply log in to your control panel and look for the CloudFlare icon. With two clicks, you can activate CloudFlare, and your website will automatically become faster and more secure worldwide. To activate Railgun, log in to your CloudFlare account, go to the performance settings, and select "On" for Railgun. Then, choose our Railgun server called cloudflare.crservers.com.

8. What should I do if I have trouble activating Railgun?

If you experience issues activating Railgun, please open a ticket with us here.

9. I am not a CloudFlare customer, can I use Railgun?

No. You must be a CloudFlare customer to use Railgun.

10. I am seeing an error on my site and I think Railgun is causing it, what should I do?

Log in to your CloudFlare account, go to the performance settings, and disable Railgun from there. Please submit an error report with a detailed description here.