Cloudflare Optimized Partner™
Servebolt is obsessed with reducing network latency, because that means faster end user performance. Therefore, we have partnered with the World’s leading CDN provider, to ensure we can meet our low latency demands globally.
The joint mission of Cloudflare® and Servebolt is to make sure that data travels as fast as possible from the Servebolt Cloud™️ – to website visitors.
Our data centers are connected and optimized, all around the globe.
Why compression is important for network performance
Why do we use compression?
It is important to compress data before sending it over the internet, or between data centers. The reason for that is that data is transported packages of limited sizes. Smaller amounts of data, will require fewer network roundtrips.
Every network roundtrip, travels the full distance from A to B. So by compressing and reducing the size at point A, before sending it over the network, and decompressing it at point B – we save network roundtrips.
Resources are used at both ends to compress and decompress, but the speed of these extra operations is much faster than doing more roundtrips to move the data.
How we work with compression
Compression is something that is used by close to all web servers, globally. If it were possible to compress faster, or compress better – that would be a great benefit for the internet.
That’s why Servebolt co-founder Hans Kristian Rosbach rebuilt the widely used compression library zlib which is used for gzip. He maintains a drop-in replacement version for next generation computer systems, zlib-ng. This project also implements a variety of custom Cloudflare optimizations, in addition to dropping support for ancient processor architectures.
Of course, zlib-ng is in use on all Servebolt Cloud hosting and it compresses both faster and harder than stock z-lib.
caching the un-cacheable
Railgun™ origin network optimizer
Railgun ensures that the connection between the Servebolt Cloud server and the Cloudflare network, is as fast as possible. That is important, because Cloudflare is a proxy CDN.
How does a proxy CDN work?
In the following example the visitor is requesting a page hosted on the origin server. But Cloudflare is enabled, and the request is first sent to Cloudflare. Cloudflare knows on what origin server this resource exists, and passes the request back to the origin server over the internet. This is how proxy CDNs, also called pull CDNs work. The origin server sends the requested resource back through Cloudflare, who finally pass it back to the visitor.
The thing is, that the same dynamic resources often are requested multiple times and that the difference between similar requests are very small. That’s why Railgun was invented!
How Railgun works
Railgun speeds up the network speed between our data centers. It does this by storing a copy the last version of a requested resource, on the Cloudflare network edge. When the next request comes, Railgun sends a request back to the Origin server saying “Hey, I got a request for X, I have version 44”. The origin server Railgun then fetches a fresh copy of the requested resource in the origin data center, runs a diff against version 44 – and transfers back only the changes, instead of the full resource.
On the Cloudflare edge, version 44 is combined with the fresh changes – before the resource is returned to the visitor. This process allows a “compression ratio” of up to 99.6%! This can result in significant performance improvements, for certain types of requests.
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Railguns are available in
all Servebolt Cloud regions
Railgun origin network optimization works for WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento – and all other platforms.
The Servebolt + Cloudflare network
Peering and connected on the large Internet exchanges
The Servebolt Cloud locations are all in very close proximity to the Cloudflare Edge. Therefore, the network path in between us is as short as possible. This results in faster routing, and better user experiences.
Did you know that the network latency between Servebolt servers and Cloudflare edge is as low as 0.3 ms ? That’s close 😮
Cloudflare for the Enterprise
Servebolt is a certified Cloudflare Enterprise Partner and delivers global CDN and security solutions for corporations world wide.
