'Net Features : wm-webhosting

1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server Enhances Scalability for SMBs

Michael Garrity — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:10:00 GMT

Web hosting company 1&1 Internet recently upgraded its 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server that will make the solution more flexible and cost efficient.

The biggest change to the server is an increased focus on scalability that allows it to meet a customer’s performance requirements at any time. This is primarily through the inclusion of dynamically adjustable resources, including Processor Cores (vCore), RAM (GB) and Hard Disk Space (GB) that can be configured up or down by the users, themselves.

In addition, 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server customers can add up to 99 virtual machines (as required) without migration under a single contract, as the new updates come with no fixed contract, at all; instead, costs are dependent upon the configuration in place, so users only pay for the resources they require and use. There are no basic fees, setup fees, minimum contract terms or transparency of per-hour costs.

All servers are available in both Linux and Windows configurations, which are installed automatically, and include full root access, 2000 GB of traffic, unlimited on-demand Snapshot Backups, Parallels Plesk 11 and a $60 starting credit; they also come with fail-safe security through redundant cores and storage.

These changes to the 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server give small and medium-sized businesses the opportunity to leverage high performance for just short periods of time, while only paying for the actual requirements they use.

CloudAccess Integrates Identity and Access Management

Michael Garrity — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Cloud-based unified security solution provider CloudAccess has recently announced version 3.0 release of its CloudIDM/AM system, featuring seamless, “unique” integration between enterprise identity management and access controls (i.e. single sign-on and access management) from the cloud.

In addition, CloudIDM/AM 3.0 comes with multi-directional password synchronization between the system’s identity management solution, Active Directory and/or Lightweight Director Access Protocol (LDAP), as well as a federated gateway that allows access to an application or website, a dynamic self-service portal and centralized GUI-based workflow automation.

"We've taken the next evolutionary step to integrate the key capabilities of provisioning, multi-factor authentication and role-based workflow management with an advanced single sign on for SaaS and legacy applications and manage it all from the cloud," said Kevin Nikkhoo, CEO of CloudAccess.

Because of a proliferation of SaaS applications, increased complexity with “bring-your-own-deivce” and general user mobility, many organizations these days are suffering from more and more vulnerability gaps. As a result, regulatory agencies have made it a legal requirement to continuously monitor and report on user access. So, straight out of the box, the newly updated CloudIDM/AM system will include the streamlined ability to automate compulsory reporting in a way that satisfies the compliance governance for a variety of agencies, including HIPAA, PCI, FFIEC, NIST FERC and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Since it is a cloud-deployed SaaS solution, CloudIDM/AM 3.0 doesn’t require any hardware or software to install, and it will integrate with other scalable security solutions, like SIEM and log management systems. Plus, the whole suite can be monitored in real time from a single dashboard.

CloudIDM/AM 3.0 is currently available for direct sale, or through various reseller channels.

Deliver Enterprise Apps with Improved Performance, Speed

Michael Garrity — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:56:00 GMT

Performance is everything for enterprise organizations, particularly when it comes to delivering applications to thousands of users at once.

In order to improve application delivery performance, Array Networks has announced four new enterprise-class application delivery controllers: APV2600 for small-to-medium-sized businesses, APV5600 for enterprise’s with ‘larger traffic demands,” APV10600 for global organizations and service providers and Array’s top-shelf application delivery controller, the APV10650.

Each of these new appliances places a particular emphasis on providing enhanced price performance for 2048-bit SSL acceleration, which is currently the most common “advanced” feature for customers that are buying a load balancer or application delivery controller, as it helps ensure secure applications, content and transactions over the Internet.

In addition, these new delivery controllers provide server and link load balancing, global server load balancing (GSLB), connection multiplexing, SSL acceleration, compression, caching, traffic shaping and application security. It also comes with a number of “next generation features” at no extra cost, such as:

-    ePolicy scripting that allows administrators to create custom logic to control application traffic

-    IPv6 Ready Forum Gold Certification that supports feature parity and the ability to operate in IPv6 networks

-    Support for migration from IPv4 to IPv6, along with a means for both networks and clients to communicate

-    Independent Session Control that improves persistence and security, while enhancing application performance

-    An eCloud API that give cloud providers a scripting tool to assist with integrating APV Series ADCs with cloud management systems

-    And additional ADC features, including TCP stateful failover, N+1 clustering, role-based administration control and advanced ACLs

The new Array APV Series application delivery controllers are available now.

Provision and Manage CloudByte Volumes with OpenStack Cinder

Michael Garrity — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

The CloudByte cloud storage service, which was the first to provide guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to every application from a shared storage platform, just announced a new major integration with Cinder, the OpenStack block storage project.

CloudByte also developed a driver for the Cinder framework, known as ElastiStor, to enable service providers to provision and manage QoS-aware CloudByte storage volumes from OpenStack clients and the project’s API.

This means that service providers on the OpenStack platform can create, take snapshots of and manage CloudByte storage volumes using either the Cinder API or the OpenStack Horizon client. These volumes can then be configured to meet the user’s capacity and IOPS needs. With on-demand performance from CloudByte, OpenStack users will now be able to build solutions that an more effectively compete with Amazon EBS.

“Unlike legacy storage solutions, ElastiStor is architected for today’s cloud environments and allows cloud service providers to host performance-sensitive applications without creating any dedicated storage silos” explains CloudByte CTO, Felix Xavier.

Spam Web Hosting and SEO Rankings

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Most of the Web's 150 million active domains use shared hosting. It's more accessible from a cost perspective, and in general does not come with any less features or functionality than dedicated hosting does.

But when you use shared hosting you are essentially "sharing" hosting space with other websites - some of which may host spam. And as we all know, spam is bad and can result in not just poor experiences for users but could it also affect your position on the search results?

In a new Google Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts discusses the topic and whether or not a site that is hosted by a service that hosts spam has anything to worry about in terms of a negative impact on search rankings. The short answer is no, it doesn't - but there are some "fringe" cases to consider.

“Typically a hosting company has a lot of different stuff on it. Some of it will be good. Some of it will be bad,” says Cutts. “There will be some spam, but just because you happen to be on an IP address or using a hosting company that also hosts some spam, that doesn’t mean that you should be affected.”

See What's New in WM's Hosting Panel Channel

Secrets for Dealing with Downtime

Administrator — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

:: By Chris Heyn, KEMP Technologies ::

Downtime effectively occurs for two reasons that are either planned or unplanned. Serious downtime can be caused by:

• Network failure either LAN or WAN

• A server fault resulting in it becoming offline

Sometimes it is necessary to take servers offline for planned events including maintenance of the hardware or upgrades to applications or server operating systems. Unplanned downtime can take place at any moment and is beyond the control of the IT department administrators. Causes can be minor issues such as a hard disk or power supply that fails to a catastrophic event for example a fire , a flood or an earthquake. One of the important points to take note of is that downtime be it planned or unplanned will eventually take place and it is not a case of if it happens but rather when will it happen.

Making sure your servers are located in a secure setting is of top importance, for example if your servers are located in the parts of the U.S. that are at risk of suffering the effects of hurricanes, the premises should be constructed as hurricane proof. In addition comprehensive firefighting installations should be installed to protect your servers from that risk. However you can never be 100 percent sure your premises are invincible and so making provision for back up facilities in a different location makes good sense. The intelligent use of geographic load balancers can divert traffic to your backup sites should the primary site be taken off line.

Regular server maintenance makes sense and allows to clean up the server and restore it to its original performance levels, having installed backup servers load balancers and therefore increased the redundancy in your network means these server outages will have less effect on your users. If maintenance is not performed minor problems in your servers will eventually grow more serious and the server will stop working. As you plan your back up facilities consider the cost to the business of unplanned downtime both in terms of business lost as well as damage o the image of the organization.

Don’t confuse the terms server uptime and server availability, they are two different things. Your servers could be running fine but are not available to the users because a component in your network a router, firewall or WAN equipment could have failed, this counts against server availability. By selecting servers with dual power supplies and multiple network cards you can increase their reliability, however to really achieve a H/A network make sure you install two or more load balancers configured in high availability mode.

Defining the Downtime Rules

If you ask an IT Manager about the permitted levels of down time the organization targets the reply needs to be more than just a percentage for example 99 percent. Actual downtime values set on an annual basis are as follows:

• 99% = 87 hours 35 minutes

• 99.9% = 8 hours 45 minutes

• 99.99% = 52 minutes 35 seconds

• 99,999% = 5 minutes 16 seconds

The cost of minimizing your permitted downtime varies server by server and is more complex because different server functions have a different level of criticality. A print server going off line is more likely to be annoying than critical, however it is a different matter if your mission critical database server fails as the damage to the business is immediate. You should bear these different levels of criticality in mind as you estimate the costs for raising the reliability of your systems because of it will cost you $95,000 to raise your reliability on a server from 99.99 percent to 99.999 percent but your business would only lose $1,000 a minute thanks to downtime the investment does not make a good return.

Perhaps the most intelligent method of measuring the server performance is not whether it can handle 80, 100 or 200 sessions simultaneously but the effective time it takes users to complete their transactions. If you offer an e-commerce site where the percentage of users who can complete their transactions at peak traffic periods is too low it is not the number of users who can connect but the number who are unable to complete their purchases successfully that should be the point you care about and intend to resolve because your servers can still be running but you are losing revenue as disappointed potential customers abandon your site.

About the Author

Chris Heyn is the General Manager of KEMP Technologies Italy. He lives in a small village called Arcene about 40kms from Milan. For the past 14 years Chris has been involved in business development for ICT companies looking to expand their activities into Italy and the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Middle East.

Why Green Hosting Matters

Administrator — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:34:00 GMT

By Kelly Meeneghan, Manager, 1&1 Internet, Inc.

When it comes to the level of technical support needed to maintain a fully functional website, not many people consider the impact it has on the environment. Just one website requires an entire server to be running 24 hours per day, seven days per week while housed and secured in a large data center. With more than 100,000 websites created each day, it is no wonder why the concept of ‘Green Hosting’ is attracting so much attention in the industry.

Hosting companies should take their carbon footprint very seriously and execute steps to ensure they are operating with green energy, while providing eco-friendly technology to its users. Understanding the inherent need for significant energy conservation encourages the company to continue protecting the environment as much as possible.

While this green mindset is a great strategy for hosts, customers are also benefiting from these initiatives. By supporting a sustainable environment, they are implementing a strong marketing strategy. For example, if a consumer is comparison-shopping between two similar businesses, environmentally conscious characteristics can be the deciding factor. Taking this information, hosts have developed logos for customers to include on their websites communicating that they are “Powered by Green Hosting.” Using this tool to generate a positive reputation helps to draw more profits and gain credibility as a business.

What was once an industry uninformed about its energy consumption is now one Whythat has actively started to adopt different resource methods to minimize the impact on the environment. A popular strategy for the hosting industry has become the implementation of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to offset the amount of energy consumed with reusable energy powered by wind, sun, water or biogas. Partnering with organizations like the Bonneville Environmental Foundation allows for the simple purchasing of these RECs for larger organizations.

Solutions for offsetting energy use is a significant element for a green hosting strategy, yet Web professionals should also investigate all of the green efforts a company makes. Implementation of paperless billing to save trees and operating with highly efficient power supplies resulting in less than 20 percent heat loss, are all aspects of a truly green organization.

Every year, additional developments and innovations are emerging to offer alternative solutions for energy usage. The rise of cloud technology and for example, things like dual hosting services, are both making Web hosts more conscience of what may be their lasting mark on their surroundings. Though, these technologies require more resources in order to sustain a strong, reliable service, implementing these special means to counteract the environmental impact is worth the effort and is taken seriously throughout the hosting industry.

About the Author

Kelly Meeneghan is a manager for 1&1 Internet, Inc. (www.1and1.com). As a global leader among Web hosts, 1&1 provides businesses with the tools necessary to get online and be successful. Meeneghan is also a regular contributor for WebsiteMagazine.

Learn to Mitigate DDoS Attacks

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Despite being a method which has been used for more than a decade, Distributed Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) attacks have recently surged in popularity across a number of verticals.

Prolexic, which provides DDoS protection services, recently launched the first of several white papers that discusses and analyzes Domain Name System (DNS) Reflection attacks, specifically.

According to Prolexic, the DNS Reflection DrDoS technique exploits security weaknesses in the DNS Internet protocol, an important Internet feature that allows the public to type in human-friendly domain names instead of numerical IP addresses to access websites.

“DNS Reflection DrDoS attacks are an overlooked but dangerous DDoS attack method,” said Stuart Scholly, Prolexic President. “Prolexic is releasing this white paper to help make DNS server administrators, IT administrators and business leaders aware of this potential security threat against their networks. In addition, the white paper can help victims understand the technical details of what took place, so they can more quickly mitigate these kinds of DDoS attacks in the future.”

Prolexic explains this type of threat as when a cyberattacker leverages zombie computers in a botnet to send domain name requests to DNS servers in a way that causes DNS servers to send a flood of responses to a targeted domain. This kind of DrDoS attack can overwhelm and slow response times, or completely stop legitimate user access, and affects both the DNS servers and the targeted domain.

Additionally, a DNS Reflection attack is relatively easy for cybercriminals to launch, and takes advantage of security loopholes in the DNS protocol, the Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) warns. What’s more, it is difficult to pinpoint the source of a reflected DDoS attack, offering anonymity to the attacker.

The DNS Reflection Attack white paper explains DNS and how an attacker exploits the protocol to cause an outage. The white paper is available free of charge at www.prolexic.com/drdos.

8 Great Green Hosting Providers

Amberly Dressler — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:35:00 GMT

Selecting a Web host is a tough decision that not only affects a website’s success, but also the environment.

According to HostGator (featured below), the average server produces the same emissions as a 15 mpg SUV. When you look at HostGator, the company hosts more than 4,000,000 websites on its shared and reseller Web hosting servers, which means a lot of carbon emissions. Let’s see how this company and others are making a difference in the hosting world.

Host: HostGator
Estimated Web Popularity*: 139

Going Green: Initially, HostGator took steps to minimize its environmental impact at the office, but the company wasn’t satisfied. HostGator expanded its eco-friendly initiatives a step further by switching to 36 percent more efficient servers, but the hosting business still wasn’t satisfied. Today, all of HostGator’s Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) have been registered, verified and retired from the market. Additionally, all of its shared and reseller servers are now 130 percent wind powered. Lastly, HostGator has purchased certified RECs representing 130 percent of the electricity used to both power and cool every one its servers.

Host: iPage
Estimated Web Popularity: 7,460

Going Green: iPage reduced its carbon footprint by purchasing enough RECs to offset its energy use by 200 percent. That means:

Host: DreamHost
Estimated Web Popularity: 8,169

Going Green: When DreamHost learned that running its company generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-sized homes, stakeholders realized they had to do something to neutralize their emissions. They found the most effective approach begins with resource conservation: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page, etc.

“Efforts are being ramped up here daily to do what we do with less,” reads the company website. “The next step is to use clean, renewable energy. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility for us, this means purchasing Renewable Energy Credits. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions we’ve invested in Emission Reduction Credits (a.k.a. “offsets”) which guarantee our remaining impact is effectively erased.”

DreamHost also holds a Certificate of Carbon Neutralization:

Host: FatCow
Estimated Web Popularity: 10,152

Going Green: FatCow’s company offices and data centers are powered by 100 percent wind energy, and the hosting provider offers a variety of free green badges that customers can add to their websites to announce they’re going green. FatCow believes that by adding their badge to a website can:

• Appeal to eco-conscious customers

• Verify that a website is powered by renewable energy

• Build a reputation as environmentally responsible

Host: HostPapa
Estimated Web Popularity: 24,011

Going Green: HostPapa was one of the first Web hosting companies to make a public commitment to going green. The company promotes the development and use of wind and solar energy resources by purchasing green energy certificates to offset all the power it uses in its data centers and offices. By putting equivalent clean energy back into the grid, the company effectively reduced its carbon footprint and supports renewable energy initiatives.

Host: GreenGeeks
Estimated Web Popularity: 24,911

Going Green: GreenGeeks pulls energy from the grid in order to make sure that it has a constant power flow for its servers and to make sure the servers would not be interrupted by a lack of power. According to the company, in order to compensate for the power it pulls from the grid, GreenGeeks purchases three times that amount in wind energy credits.

“This allows our customers to say that their web sites are 300 percent green and are actually helping to make the Web hosting and power systems greener, not just covering the carbon footprint but covering other carbon foot prints as well,” reads the website.

Here are some examples of the logos its clients can use to show their websites are hosted green:

Host: ThinkHost
Estimated Web Popularity: 110,976

Going Green: Most of ThinkHost’s staff telecommutes, so they aren’t contributing to global warming through trips to and from work. The company also uses little in the way of paper, as data is stored electronically. And most of the staff use notebook computers and low wattage lighting, reducing electricity requirements. What electricity they do use, including the amount used by servers, is 100 percent powered by renewable wind and solar energy.

The company also plants a tree for every new client.

Host: Green Host It
Estimated Web Popularity: 430,476

Going Green: Green Host It’s Web hosting servers are located in a green data center, and the company offsets its electricity usage with 100 percent Texas Certified Wind Power. Additionally, the company utilizes corporate Hybrid vehicles and its telecommuting staff further reduces its carbon footprint. According to Green Host It, taking just one employee off the road for a year is equivalent to removing approximately 13 tons of greenhouse gases. When website owners choose this hosting provider, they will receive a green badge to display on their sites, which is a way to start a green marketing campaign, because it shows their website visitors that their company is environmentally conscious.

*Estimated Web popularity is based on the monthly traffic rank provided by Ranking.com.

ownCloud Gets New Look

Amberly Dressler — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:15:00 GMT

With a focus on quality, security and performance, ownCloud, the popular open-source alternative to Dropbox, released its ownCloud Server 5.0., which offers dozens of improvements, including a new design that makes the service more intuitive to use. ownCloud's new search engine also ensures a responsive user experience, as the Lucene-based full text search engine addition allows users to find files by names and also by content.

The main navigation was also redesigned to clearly differentiate it from the in-app navigations, according to the company's official blog. Additionally, the settings and log-out menus were combined into a user menu on the top right, which shows the currently logged in user and makes it more intuitive to use. Concerning the new version's performance, some tests show up to 500 percent faster performance compared with ownCloud 4.5, according to the company.

Other improvements include: new antivirus app, new files undelete feature, new REST APIs, display names, new photo gallery, new documentation system, LDAP/AD enhancements, enhanced external storage app, improved versioning, expanded file cache, improved apps management, improved bookmarks, improved contacts, improved syncing and other general fixes.

Let's explore some of these improvements further:

New Antivirus App - ownCloud reports that the new antivirus system scans uploaded files for viruses. The admin can choose if infected files should be deleted automatically and/or logged/reported in the log file.

New Files Undelete Feature - Users can now undelete files that were accidentally deleted through the Web interface.

General Fixes - ownCloud fixed various bugs, UI enhancements and performance improvements. Most notably, according to the company, a 5x improvement in disk write actions, as well as better overall scalability. Other general fixes include: Windows server support extended; PDF viewer is updated for improved performance and compatibility; improved media player; improved overall performance; improved download performance; and during a download, the file size and progress is shown.

ownCloud is also looking to serve as a replacement for the soon-to-be retired Google Reader. The company will also release a stable version of ownCloud News in the next two months.

ForgeRock Open Identify Stack in Focus

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:55:00 GMT

Open source identify and access management (or IAM for short) provider ForgeRock, one of the true pioneers of the space, has released a new version that aims to simplify identity and access management and further protect cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, SaaS, and enterprise environments through some interesting means.

Most noteworthy about this latest ForgeRock release is that it extends the platform’s flexibility by adding a single, unified REST API across the entire stack, ideal for building common identity services across consumer, mobile, social and even enterprise applications. Let’s take a closer look.

ForgeRock OpenAM 10.1 provides customers with support for the OAuth 2.0 standard, and gives end-users the ability to authorize third-party access to their cloud resources with sharing credentials. It’s OpenIDM version 2.1 is now much improved with a discovery engine that enables organizations to sync users across multiple data stores to ensures records are up to date.

“Developers, architects, and users have been asking for a unified stack with these capabilities for the last 10 years,” said Mike Ellis, CEO, ForgeRock. “With the new release of our Open Identity Stack we have strengthened our revolutionary approach to identity and access management, providing developers with a truly integrated, open-source identity platform to tightly control their enterprise, cloud, social, and mobile systems. By providing a high value driven platform for IAM that enables true cloud scale functionality, ForgeRock is allowing enterprises globally to expand their reach to customers, suppliers and consumers through a common cloud technology platform.”

Hyve Delivers Performance Visibility with CopperEgg Cloud Monitoring

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:35:00 GMT

Cloud monitoring service CopperEgg, and Hyve, a cloud hosting provider in the UK, are joining forces to deliver CopperEgg’s cloud performance visibility data directly to Hyve customers.

Hyve has also joined CopperEgg’s Cloud Performance Partner Program, wherein participating cloud and managed hosting providers can offer their clients discounts on CopperEgg services – which are compatible with any IaaS or PaaS environment including OpenStack or VMware hosting infrastructures.

"Hyve prides itself on delivering the highest quality cloud hosting solutions to our clients," said Jon Lucas, Technical Account Manager at Hyve.

"We are committed to offer only the best of breed architecture and value to our customers, and in that spirit, we are excited to now offer CopperEgg best-of-breed cloud monitoring to Hyve clients. CopperEgg provides an unbiased view of cloud infrastructure performance of the entire cloud service and application being delivered by our customers, including our own service quality."

Windows Azure Cloud Apps Secured with Barracuda

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:15:00 GMT

Security concerns are on the rise among Web professionals.

In fact, 87 percent of IT professionals surveyed in a May 2012 Intel study indicated they were “very” or “moderately” concerned when it comes to security and data protection in adopting the public cloud - and for good reason. Forrester Research estimates that more than 67 percent of Internet vulnerabilities happen at the application layer. Can anything be done? Yes, yes it can.

Barracuda Networks has recently announced a relationship with Microsoft to offer protection of Web applications hosted in the Windows Azure cloud with the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Developers using Windows Azure will be able to protect their apps against threats including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and sessions tampering in the same way they are able to do so in the on-premise data centers.

“We are pleased that Microsoft is working with us to address the risks associated with deploying web applications in the cloud,” said Rod Mathews, vice president for business development at Barracuda Networks. “We are seeing an increase in the need for our customers to deploy high-level application security in their cloud environments to protect the applications themselves and the data that resides in them.”

State of Cloud Storage – Azure Ousts Amazon S3

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:15:00 GMT

So who’s the best cloud storage provider – Azure, Amazon, Google, HP, Rackspace?

Enterprise storage provider Nasuni released results from its latest State of Cloud Storage Report and found that Microsoft Windows Azure (Blob) Storage outperformed last year’s leader, Amazon S3. Surprised?

Nasuni tested the speed (write/read/delete), availability and scalability of the top five public cloud storage providers and found that Microsoft Azure surpassed Amazon in every single category that was examined.

Azure was 56 percent faster in write speed than Amazon, and 39 percent faster at reading files than HP in read speed. The average response time for Azure was 25 percent faster than Amazon S3. With Amazon cloud troubles over the past year, Web developers might ultimately find they’re using more Azure and less S3 in the future.

"Microsoft's investment in its second generation cloud storage, which it made available to customers last year, has clearly paid off," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "With Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure, the cloud storage industry clearly has two strong players to choose from. Even more encouraging, however, was the marked performance improvement across the board. As CSPs continue to mature, competition among top quality providers can only benefit enterprise IT."

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times

Michael Garrity — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:05:00 GMT

One of the most common methods that webmasters use to speed up their sites is to cache content (such as HTML pages, JavaScript, images or CSS) to reduce bandwidth and server load and speed up delivery.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of content that can’t be cached, and when websites need to utilize that it can be problematic for performance and user experience. CloudFlare, a provider of cloud-based services to help secure and accelerate websites, is looking to alleviate this problem for its users by “caching the uncacheable” through a new Web optimization software called Railgun.

CloudFlare users are already at an advantage, because the service will not only cache content, but also deliver it to users from its various datacenters around the world. However, according to the company’s blog, “only about 66% of content is cacheable,” meaning the remaining 34 percent has to be recovered from the server of origin. That is why the company developed Railgun, which can cache dynamically generated and/or personalized Web pages using a scheme that reduces bandwidth and speeds up the loading process.

Railgun starts the acceleration process for non-cached pages by speeding up the downloading of the initial HTML, which must happen before the rest of a page can even begin downloading.

Primarily, though, Railgun is able to send Web pages across the ‘Net much more quickly because it will compress them to an astonishingly smaller version, which it’s able to do by looking at changes on a page “from download to download.” It will reduce the pages to just 0.65 percent of their original size to ensure that they travel faster from the origin server to the user’s screen, no matter where they are.

This new service is currently only available for CloudFlare Business and Enterprise customers as a part of their service packages.