HostRocket UK is excited to announce our partnership with Cloudflare, the website performance and security company.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that increases the performance and security of every website on its network, protecting from a broad range of threats and attacks. Over 12,000,000 websites run on the Cloudflare network—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments. Cloudflare powers almost a trillion monthly page views—more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.
Cloudflare increases the speed and security of your website
This is a guest post written and contributed by Cloudflare. Cloudflare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants.
Faster web performance
Cloudflare was designed to take a hosting platform like HostRocket UK and make it more fast, secure, and reliable.
Cloudflare runs 165 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for Cloudflare, we begin routing traffic to the nearest data center.
As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.
Cloudflare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, Cloudflare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that Cloudflare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.
Broad web security
At the beginning of 2016, Cloudflare experienced and mitigated against some of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. As attacks like these increase, Cloudflare is stepping up to protect websites.
Cloudflare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the Cloudflare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.
In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the Cloudflare network.
Signing up
Any website can deploy Cloudflare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with HostRocket UK, we make the process of setting up Cloudflare "1 click" through your existing HostRocket UK cPanel dashboard. Just look for the Cloudflare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud.
We’ve kept the price as low as possible, and plans offered through HostRocket UK are free. Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.
For site owners who would like to take advantage of Cloudflare's advanced offerings, we also offer a 'Pro' tier of service for $20/month. The 'Pro' tier includes all of the 'Free' tier's offerings, as well as extra features like image optimization, mobile acceleration, basic web application firewall (WAF), and 3 page rules.
We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the Cloudflare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with HostRocket UK.
CloudFlare Railgun™ Origin Network Optimizer
As a CloudFlare Optimized Partner, we are thrilled to offer the CloudFlare Railgun™ technology to all our customers for free (worth $200/month!) with our Growth hosting package and above. Railgun is CloudFlare’s latest performance optimization technology that gives you significant improvements in site load times. To activate Railgun, log into your control panel and select Railgun “On”. Read on for additional details and instructions:
Railgun ensures that the connection between our network and the CloudFlare network is as fast as possible. Railgun achieves a 99.6% compression ratio for previously uncacheable web objects by using techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. The average website can expect a 1.43x performance increase.
When a request is made to a CloudFlare server for a web page that is not in cache CloudFlare makes an HTTP connection to the origin server to request the page. It's that HTTP connection that Railgun accelerates and secures.
Even highly dynamic websites change slowly
Railgun works by recognizing that uncacheable web pages do not change very rapidly. For example, during an experiment, the CNN.com homepage HTML was captured once, and then again after 5 minutes and then again after one hour. The page sizes were 92,516, five minutes still 92,516 and one hour later 93,727.
CNN sets the caching on this page to 60 seconds. After one minute, it is necessary to download the entire page again. However, looking inside the page, not much has changed. In fact, the change between versions is on the order of 100s of bytes out of almost 100k. Here’s a screenshot of one of the binary differences between the CNN home page at five minute intervals. The yellow bytes have changed, the rest have not.
Experiments at CloudFlare have revealed similar change values across the web. For example, reddit.com changes by about 2.15% over five minutes and 3.16% over an hour. The New York Times home page changes by about 0.6% over five minutes and 3% over an hour. BBC News changes by about 0.4% over five minutes and 2% over an hour.
Although the dynamic web is not cacheable, it is also not changing quickly. That means that from moment to moment there’s only a small change between versions of a page. CloudFlare Railgun uses this fact to achieve very high rates of compression. This is very similar to how video compression looks for changes from frame to frame; Railgun looks for changes on a page from download to download.
Railgun Technology
Railgun consists of two components: the sender and the listener. The sender is installed at every CloudFlare data center around the world. The listener is a software component that HostRocket UK has installed on our network for customers.
The sender and listener establish a permanent TCP connection that’s secured by TLS. This TCP connection is used for the Railgun protocol. It’s an all binary multiplexing protocol that allows multiple HTTP requests to be run simultaneously and asynchronously across the link. Or in other words, a persistent connection is opened between CloudFlare’s network and ours and eliminates the overhead of TCP.
We have made it simple for our customers to get the benefits of Railgun with one click.
יום שבת, ינואר 12, 2019
