QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections)

This article discusses QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), an experimental protocol designed to improve website performance.

About QUIC

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new, experimental protocol developed by Google. It is designed to improve performance for connection-oriented web applications by using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) instead of the reliable, but slower TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).

QUIC is enabled by default on Turbo accounts, as well as Reseller accounts with Turbo. However, it only works in specific configurations:

  • QUIC does not work with Cloudflare.
  • QUIC only works with secure (HTTPS) connections, not regular HTTP.
  • You cannot use self-signed SSL certificates with QUIC. Only trusted SSL certificates issued by a CA (Certificate Authority) work.

Verifying QUIC is active

To verify that QUIC is active, type the following command at a command prompt. Replace example.com with the domain name of the site you want to check:

curl -I https://example.com
The -I option instructs curl to retrieve the HTTP headers only, instead of the full page content.

If QUIC is active, the response header contains the alt-svc: quic value, as shown in the following sample header:

HTTP/2 200 
x-powered-by: PHP/5.5.38
content-type: text/html
date: Mon, 30 Oct 2017 21:39:46 GMT
accept-ranges: bytes
server: LiteSpeed
alt-svc: quic=":443"; ma=2592000; v="35,37,38,39"

More Information

For more information about QUIC, please visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC.

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