Cloudflare Railgun FAQ

Cloudflare Railgun was a WAN optimisation technology that accelerated the delivery of dynamic, non-cached content by sending only the differences between page requests rather than the full response each time.

What was Railgun?

Railgun was a WAN optimisation technology offered to Kualo hosting customers in partnership with Cloudflare. While Cloudflare automatically caches a large proportion of the resources needed to build a page, dynamic or "do not cache" content cannot be cached in the usual way - and that uncached portion is often the initial HTML that a browser must download first. Railgun targeted exactly that content.

How did it work?

Railgun opened a secure, tunnelled connection between the Cloudflare network and your origin server. Rather than transferring the full response on every request, it sent only the differences in markup from one request to the next - similar in principle to how video encoding works. Those differences were cached in memory on the Cloudflare side to keep processing as fast as possible. The result was less bandwidth used, shorter transfer times, and lower overall page load times, particularly for dynamic sites.

What were the performance benefits?

Sites running Railgun showed a 143% improvement in HTML load times and a 90% decrease in Time To First Byte (TTFB).

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a third-party service you can connect to your Kualo hosting account. It provides performance, security, and availability improvements by running a globally distributed network that caches static content, filters malicious traffic, and helps absorb traffic spikes. You can enable Cloudflare for free directly from the Cloudflare icon in cPanel.