HTTP/2, ESI & Even More Turbo Hosting Speed Boosts!

When we launched our Turbo Servers back in November 2014, we touted up to 20X faster page load speeds thanks to a number of features like the A2 Optimized Site Accelerator, fewer users per server and enhanced performance over Apache. If 20X faster page loads weren’t enough for you to give our Turbo offering a try, we’ve updated these servers and included even more features:

• SPDY

SPDY is Google’s update of the HTTP protocol. It is designed to make the data transmission from a server to the browser faster, decrease latency and streamline data flow all in an effort to make the web faster. While SPDY is available on Turbo Servers, Google has announced they will be ending the development of SPDY in favor of…

• HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is based on Google’s SPDY project and actually marks the first major HTTP update since 1999! Google does not see a reason to continue developing SPDY mainly because the features of SPDY and HTTP/2 are almost identical and HTTP/2 will be an official standard.

The goal of HTTP/2 is obviously improved performance. HTTP/2 delivers files 20%-30% faster than HTTP. It accomplishes this by making network connections more efficient through multiplexing. With HTTP, file loading requests between the browser and server cannot be accomplished until each individual request reaches its turn in a queue. This can cause bottlenecks. With HTTP/2’s multiplexing ability, multiple files can be requested at the same time. HTTP/2 also avoids bottlenecks because it can prioritize requests so they don’t get stuck behind slow loading requests in a queue.

• Edge Side Include (ESI)

With ESI, you no longer have to designate an entire page as non-cacheable just because one portion cannot be cached. Instead you can easily designate portions of your page to be cached (or not cached) using ESI.

An example of where ESI is particularly helpful is with an eCommerce solution like Magento cart. Since the shopping cart is on every page, the page becomes non-cacheable once a visitor adds a product to the cart. This is a shame since 95% of the page could still be cacheable. ESI allows you to configure different portions of the page so those sections can still have caching speed advantages.