Your Simple Hosting sites just got faster

Web Accelerator, our reverse proxy and HTTP(S) caching service is used to serve millions of pages each day and significantly contributes to the performance capabilities of sites hosted on our Simple Hosting platform. In fact, we use it ourselves for the servers hosting Gandi’s own websites/

Thanks to an upgrade progressively deployed across our data centers, we have been able to see performance improvements as well as global improvements on all of our services.

HTTP/2 activated for communication between the client and our platform

Improvements made to the new HTTP protocol allow your visitors to access your site’s resources more quickly, even with a sub-optimal connection.

We have activated HTTP/2 on our platform only for communication between our Web Accelerators and web browsers. Communication between our platform and your applications still takes place in HTTP/1.1, which should make this update completely seamless.

Performance improvements are thus automatically available for visitors using browsers that support HTTP/2, but as a developer, you cannot yet take advantage of features like streaming on HTTP/2.

Please note that HTTP/2 requires an SSL connection (https).

Quicker HTTPS with higher security, thanks to TLS 1.3

The new version of the TLS protocol is quicker than the preceding version, notably because it only requires one roundtrip between the client and the server in order to establish an encrypted connection. TLS 1.3 also removes some old functions planned to be removed, eliminating certain attack vectors and making this version more secure than previous ones.

The most popular web browsers already support TLS 1.3, which means that the majority of users can already take advantage of these performance improvements immediately and totally seamlessly. As a developer, you don’t have to do anything!

Several improvements in the caching service

The use of HTTP(S) caching is fundamental for rapid responses to visitors. Rather than reply to all requests from your instance, our caching service allows you to serve an unlimited number of images, stylesheets, javascript files, and even entire pages directly from our platform.

The new features announced today allow you greater flexibility in the management of objects placed in cache and greater reliability:

• You can create and delete object groups using “Surrogate-Key” headers.
• The PURGEALL command allows you to immediately remove objects from the cache.
• The database containing GeoIP information is regularly updated.
• We support CloudFlare natively. CloudFlare SSL certificates are now supported and HTTPS connections are assured until their arrival at Gandi. Otherwise, headers containing the IP address of the client, geolocalization information, and HTTPS related information is translated into the headers on our platform. Therefore, you can now use CloudFlare with complete end-to-end encryption.
• Whereas before the Web Accelerator platform did not take cookies into account when serving objects from the cache, you can now use the prefix STYXKEY in the name of cookies so that our platform serves these from cached objects. This allows you to use cookies, for example, to save the language preference of a user.

Please see our documentation on the caching service for more information.

We hope you are able to take full advantage of these new capabilities, but of course please do not hesitate to contact our Customer care team if you have any other questions or would like any additional information.