Your websites, applications, and experience just got 730% faster.
In partnership with CloudFlare, GreySignal is now offering Railgun technologies alongside it’s flagship products.
What is Railgun?
Railgun is a state-of-the-art content delivery network (CDN) technology developed by CloudFlare that optimizes the connection between our datacenters and your browser. Railgun uses a collection of techniques to accelerate and cache these previously uncacheable web pages so that even when our physical servers must be consulted, web content is delivered quickly. And that even works for rapidly changing pages like news sites, or for personalized content.
Our partners research showed that even though many web apps cannot be cached they actually change very slowly. For example, the New York Times home page changes throughout the day as news stories are written, but the boilerplate HTML of the page mostly stays the same and many stories stay on the front page all day. For personalized sites the boilerplate HTML is the same with only small pieces of content (such as a person’s Twitter timeline or Facebook news feed) changing. This means there’s a huge opportunity to compress web pages for transmission if the unchanging parts of a page can be detected and only the differences transmitted.
Railgun works at the server level, not the traditional image/script delivery. Railgun gets installed on our core servers, and works internally to deliver the content that really matters, the back end outputs.
This is where GreySignal saw an opportunity.
What’s this mean for GreySignal?
While 99% of our business is handcrafting beautiful software for our customers’ businesses, we needed a way to quickly deliver these applications to our customers. While our equipment in all of our datacenters are best-of-breed, we needed a technology that went above and beyond any other CDN technology out there.
We came across CloudFlare and gave Railgun a test on some of our educational applications. Our education applications are extremely database intensive, which are the hardest type of content to deliver quickly. Once installed, we saw a major increase of page load and a weight lifted off our entire platform due to the new ability to cache out data outputs.
Anyone who subscribes to an application residing on our platform, whether it’s a custom business application, healthcare, or education app, we are now able to deliver your application 730% faster thanks to our partnership with CloudFlare.
What does Railgun do for my application with GreySignal?
If you purchase the Railgun add-on, your entire application will operate 730% faster on average. If your application relies heavily on a backend database (90% of our customers do) you will feel the biggest performance gain.
If your application allows your employees, customers, and vendors to log in, all of their experiences will be much faster and enjoyable. If you plan on allowing your customers and vendors to log in, we highly suggest enabling Railgun on your account.
Can I try Railgun before I buy?
Absolutely. Simply submit a ticket within your application and ask for a trial of Railgun. We’ll alert you once it’s on, even though you may notice it immediately. The performance gain is extremely noticeable.
How much does Railgun cost?
Railgun’s price is dependent upon how your app is configured, how many instances you are running from our platform, and other factors. We suggest to contact us with your questions to obtain a quote on enabling the Railgun service.
