We have partnered with CloudFlare in order to make CloudFlare work much more efficiently on our servers than any other web hosting company, as we are a CloudFlare optimized partner. CloudFlare Optimized Partners offer all the benefits of a CloudFlare Certified Partner, plus Railgun.
CloudFlare is a service that improves your website’s performance and security. CloudFlare acts as a proxy between your visitors and our servers and can cache content and filter malicious traffic before it hits your origin server. CloudFlare is suitable for all websites, including dynamic websites. We have partnered with CloudFlare and have implemented the service into our control panel. This means you can try the service with just a few clicks. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on.
Site Performance Improvement: A typical website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast.
Bot and Threat Protection: CloudFlare uses data from third party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site.
Spam Comments Protection: CloudFlare leverages data from its own community and from third party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site.
Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers: CloudFlare alerts human visitors that have an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine.
Lower CPU Usage: As fewer requests hit your DreamHost server, this lowers the overall CPU usage of your account.
New Site Analytics: CloudFlare’s system keeps statistics on each hit and offers special insight into search engine crawlers and threats.
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. This results in an average 730% 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.
Railgun uses a new caching mechanism based on comparing page versions to determine what needs to be transmitted across the Internet to the CloudFlare network. Using this mechanism CloudFlare is able to achieve typical 99.6% compression (taking, for example, a 100k web page down to 400 bytes) and a speedup of over 700%.