In my opinion, the biggest benefits of all premium plans are the higher limits on CPU usage, processes, no hits limit at all, etc. which are also much less strictly enforced (no 24 hour suspensions for crossing the limits). The hosting will also be quite a lot faster, as premium hosting generally uses faster servers, and has far fewer accounts per server than free hosting.
Some other features that premium hosting has but free hosting doesn’t:
- PHP version selection.
- Full DNS management.
- Support for Python, Node.js and Perl applications.
I’m pretty sure it’s not.
From what I could find (I have never used it myself), enabling Railgun should be done through the Cloudflare section in cPanel. However, that cPanel plugin was not updated since 2018, and was removed some time ago because it doesn’t work anymore with the latest cPanel.
I’m not quite sure where this leaves the Cloudflare Optimized Partner program that enables datacenter level Railgun. But I personally wouldn’t let some invisible performance improvement thing sway my choice of hosting providers.
As for the other benefits:
Free hosting is (mostly) SSD powered too.