How does Peakhour work?

At a basic level Peakhour is an intelligent Reverse Proxy. What this means is the Peakhour ANYCast global network of servers sits between an end user and the web server of the website they are trying to access. A request placed by an end user's browser will be routed through the closest Peakhour server, which will inspect the request before deciding what to do with it. The possible actions it may take might be to:

• decide the request was malicious and block it;
• or to decide that the request could be fully served from a copy of the website stored locally on the Peakhour server;
• or it may let the request through to the web server for further processing.

Before returning the content from the webserver to the end user Peakhour will perform website optimisations such as shrinking files and keeping a copy so they can be served directly from Peakhour for a future request.

For further explanation see our how Peakhour works page.