About a month and a half ago, CloudFlare announced limited support for SPDY as part of a private beta. SPDY is the new protocol pioneered by Google to make the web faster. If you're curious, we've written about what makes SPDY speedy in previous blog posts.
Since that announcement, we've been testing SPDY with a couple hundred of CloudFlare's customers, as well as on CloudFlare.com itself, in a private beta. The results have been great and today we're excited to announce that SPDY is now available to any eligible CloudFlare customer from their
Performance Settings page.
Who Gets Speedy?
The current implementation of SPDY requires TLS/SSL. As a result, SPDY is only supported for paying CloudFlare customers who have SSL enabled. Even if you don't have your own SSL certificate installed on your server, you can take advantage of SPDY by enabling CloudFlare's Flexible SSL. If you're a Free customer, you can upgrade to one of CloudFlare's paid plans and enable SPDY immediately. If, in the future, the SPDY protocol supports non-HTTPS connections, we plan to extend SPDY support to Free customers as well.
Assuming you have SSL enabled, you can turn SPDY on with a single click for all traffic that passes through CloudFlare. SPDY will automatically be enabled for HTTPS traffic to browsers like Chrome and the latest version of Firefox which supports the protocol.
With widespread SPDY support, we're excited to continue to push the web forward as we continue our mission of building a faster, safer Internet.