Cloudflare CDN with Railgun: What It Does for You

A content delivery network is one of the simplest ways to make a site faster and more resilient worldwide. Here's what Cloudflare's CDN and Railgun actually do for your website.

The distance problem

Data can only travel so fast. If your server is in one country and your visitor is in another, every request makes a long round trip. A CDN solves this by caching copies of your content in data centres around the world, so visitors are served from somewhere nearby.

What the CDN caches

Static assets — images, stylesheets, scripts and fonts — are stored at the edge and delivered instantly on repeat visits. This both speeds up your pages and takes a large share of traffic off your origin server, which helps during traffic spikes.

Where Railgun helps

Not everything can be cached; dynamic pages change constantly. Railgun optimises the connection between Cloudflare and your origin for that dynamic content, compressing the differences between requests so even uncacheable pages travel faster.

ContourHost includes free Cloudflare CDN with Railgun on every plan, so you get this speed and protection without extra configuration.

The security bonus

Because traffic flows through Cloudflare's network, you also gain a layer of protection against malicious bots and denial-of-service attacks — a meaningful safety net for any growing site.

Getting the most from it

The CDN works automatically, but two habits make a real difference. First, after you update a cached page — a new price, a fixed typo, a swapped image — purge the cache so visitors see the change immediately instead of an older cached copy. Second, keep image files reasonably sized before upload; a CDN delivers a large image fast, but a compressed one delivers faster still. Together with Railgun on the dynamic side, that's the fastest combination we can offer.