Introducing QUIC Support

We’re happy to announce all our shared hosting, cloud hosting, reseller hosting and semi dedicated hosting accounts now support QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections). We’ve supported SPDY and HTTP/2 for quite some time due to our use of Litespeed. Litespeed has also supported QUIC for some time but with the rapid development of the QUIC feature we have held off on supporting it. We believe it’s reached a point of stability where we’re comfortable offering it on all hosting plans.

For the vast majority of users their web sites are already exceptionally fast with our hosting but every improvement does count in the end. SPDY then HTTP/2 brought improvements and QUIC is an attempt to improve on these more so. The goal of QUIC is to improve the performance of web sites currently using TCP by establishing a number of multiplexed connections between two endpoints over UDP. This allows for better congestion control as the packets for a website can come out of order and not tie up the entire queue of packets like what can happen with HTTP/2.

If you’re currently using Cloudflare it does not support QUIC and instead they use only HTTP/2 if the browser supports it. If you’re currently using Cloudflare I would not worry about this and we’d recommend continuing to use Cloudflare. The other thing to keep in mind is only Chrome and Opera 16 and later support QUIC. For users using other browsers such as Firefox they will continue to support HTTP/2 or HTTP 1.1 depending on the transport layer they support.

We hope you enjoy this new feature even if you may never notice the difference in performance. We’re always looking to bring great new stable technologies to our users and this is just another example of it.