As the leading performance host for open source applications, we’re pleased to announce HTTP/3 is live on all our servers! Happily, there is nothing you need to take action on. It’s already beginning to improve your website visitor’s experience. Currently about 5% of website visitors are using HTTP/3. We present the FAQs below so you can further understand the benefits.

What is HTTP/3?

HTTP/3 is the next generation protocol for exchanging information on the World Wide Web. It is now moving into production and support is growing amongst browsers. For example, our LiteSpeed web servers support it and the Safari 14 browser enables it by default.
QUIC was originally a Google effort to improve HTTP/2 by transporting it encrypted over UDP. In 2016, the IETF began working to standardize the protocol. Part of that process involved splitting QUIC into the transport protocol (QUIC) and the application protocol (HTTP/3).

What are the benefits of HTTP/3?

– Faster Page Loads – A study by Google found that using QUIC accelerated search results by 3.6 percent and YouTube load time by 15 percent
– A More Stable Connection – HTTP/3 continues sending data when one of its connections gets interrupted.
– More Secure – Connections are encrypted by default.

Why do HTTP/3 and QUIC matter?

HTTP/3, which uses QUIC as a transport layer, is a new, improved version of HTTP. Web infrastructure technology (web servers, web browsers, etc.) are being updated to support HTTP/3, and take advantage of HTTP/3’s speed, reduced latency, better handling of packet errors, and built-in encryption.

How do I enable it on my website?

It is now enabled for all websites hosted on Aspiration Hosting’s servers. If the visitor’s browser supports it, our servers will use HTTP/3.

How can I test my website with HTTP/3?

You’ll need to enable HTTP/3 in your browser. Then visit your website on Aspiration Hosting. View these instructions for your browser.

Which browsers support HTTP/3?

Experimental versions of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome support HTTP/3 behind a feature flag (for desktop as well as mobile versions of Firefox and Safari), and Safari 14 on macOS Big Sur enables support for HTTP/3 by default. Currently about 5% of visitors use HTTP/3 by default.

Will HTTP/3 replace HTTP/2?

No. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 work in a similar way, but HTTP/2 uses TCP, while HTTP/3 uses UDP-based QUIC as the transport protocol. HTTP/3 support is optional. When enabled, HTTP/3 can fall back to HTTP/2 or HTTPS if not available.

Is HTTP/3 faster than HTTP/2?

It depends. From the end-user-experience point of view: Yes! A user may feel that HTTP/3 is serving the site more fluently than HTTP/2. This is particularly true when the network conditions are less than optimal.

From a cost-of-service point of view: No! HTTP/3 costs more CPU cycles to push the same amount of traffic as HTTP/2. Though, this cost is likely to shrink as operating systems optimize their UDP subsystems.

Got more questions? Contact us!