Hawk Host Cloudflare Railgun End of Life

At Hawk Host, we’ve been supporting Cloudflare services on our network in various ways since our initial partnership in 2011, when we were among the first 25 hosting providers to partner with them. With the partnership, this meant using cPanel, any domain hosted on our servers could quickly sign up and integrate without ever interacting with Cloudflare directly. We followed this up in 2013 with support for the Cloudflare Railgun service free of charge for all users hosting websites on our networks.

Cloudflare recently deprecated the Cloudflare plugin in cPanel, which we announced in June 2022. At the same time, we were advised that Cloudflare’s Legacy Host & Reseller Partner Program would end, and an announcement about the Cloudflare Railgun would be forthcoming. Unfortunately, that announcement was never made, and our attempts to have Cloudflare provide official guidance on the situation have never happened. The Cloudflare Host & Reseller Partner Program is now shut down, and sadly that also means Hawk Host’s ability to properly maintain the Railgun systems has been removed.

As we can no longer adequately support the Railgun platform, we will remove all existing Cloudflare Railguns on April 5th, 2023. Our understanding is there should be no impact by us removing our Cloudflare Railguns other than them no longer being used by any domains with it enabled. We highly recommend that any users using the Cloudflare Railgun feature disable it before April 5th, 2023. The removal of Railgun should have minimal performance impact due to the expanded Cloudflare network and other improvements since Cloudflare announced the Railgun service in October 2013.

These changes will not remove your ability to use Cloudflare’s services in front of our hosting, and we will continue to support websites using Cloudflare in a variety of ways. For our shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated users, this means our web application firewalls are aware of Cloudflare proxying and our web servers will display the user IP rather than a Cloudflare IP. We continue to place an emphasis on providing the best routing and connectivity to Cloudflare’s global network, and that is not limited to just our shared hosting but also cloud compute customers as well. For as long as Cloudflare continues to deliver reliable products and performance enhancements for our customer’s sites we’ll continue doing our best to support them within our services and network.