Understanding CDN

The Basics

WHAT IS CDN?

A content delivery network speeds up your website by serving content closer to visitors

WHY DO YOU NEED IT?

  1. A slow website frustrates your visitors
  2. Site load times affect your search ranking
  3. Spikes in traffic will crash your web server

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

  1. Pay as you go with low bandwidth costs
  2. Make your own package and edit locations
  3. Easy setup, reporting and 24/7 support

HOW DOES CDN WORK?

Your website’s content is securely cached on our servers. We detect the location of your visitors and then load the content such as videos, images, text and HTML from the closest server.

Understanding CDN

WHERE IS MY WEBSITE STORED?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a web server which you rent or buy from a hosting company. You pay for storage, bandwidth and CPU. You may have a dedicated server, a virtual private server, cloud server or a shared hosting plan. From your hosting provider’s control panel, you can manage your domain and hosting resources through a control panel. When you sign up for CDN.net, your website will be securely cached in locations around the world.

HOW DOES CDN CACHE MY CONTENT?

By simply entering your website URL or IP address, CDN.net ‘pulls’ all of the static content from your origin host and stores it on our edge servers located around the world. We are implementing support for ‘push’ which is appropriate for uploading large files to the edge servers and ‘stream’ for live video or sound broadcasts through HTTP or real time messaging protocols.

DO YOU HAVE TO MODIFY YOUR WEB SERVER?

By changing a CNAME record through your hosting provider’s control panel, known as a DNS editor or Zone File editor, you don’t need to change any part of your website. Your visitors will retrieve content cached from our network instead of your own web server.

HOW CAN YOU SECURELY DELIVER ANY CONTENT?

You can secure any content served through our network with an SSL certificate. We encrypt your images, video and other static content through HTTPS. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) uses asymmetric cryptography for authenticating keys between a server and a user. You can use our shared SSL certificate for free or order a custom SSL domain through CDN.net.

HOW CAN YOU TEST YOUR WEBSITE LOAD TIMES?

We recommend Pingdom to monitor uptime and their free tools for testing page speed time. You simply enter your domain name and it will measure the size of each element on your page and their load times. This is independent testing that can show you how fast your site loads before and after implementing CDN. For a full list of monitoring tools for your site, see our blog post.

Who Should Use CDN?

If you own, manage or create content through a website you can use CDN.net to improve web performance. Any site that has videos, images, text or static elements such as CSS, Flash or JavaScript are suitable. Here are some examples:

DIGITAL AGENCIES

If you are a digital marketer or build sites for your clients then you should consider partnering with CDN.net to increase your clients’ online conversions with faster web performance, improve their search ranking with lower page load times and prevent an overloaded server by distributing content over our network when traffic spikes. We offer 15% to our partners for all clients they manage.

DEVELOPERS

If you build games or web applications, CDN.net speeds up delivery of static Flash and HTML elements by serving content closer to your users. It’s also a great solution to mitigate against outages of your own infrastructure for a high number of web requests. If you suffer a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which typically throws 50gbps of useless requests at your servers, can distribute the traffic over a larger network.

SELF-SERVICE

If you manage a popular site then CDN.net is easy to implement and manage through our control panel. You can prefetch large files or purge individual files if you do not want to wait for the hourly cache update. You simply have to add a CNAME record through your DNS editor and we will serve any static content from our edge server closest to your site visitors. This dramatically reduces the latency and page load times. We integrate with popular CMS systems like WordPress & Drupal.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

Our latest pricing packages are available on the PRICING page. We offer a range of packages from just $20 per month, but if you can’t find the right package for you just get in touch and we can create a bespoke package just for you.

WILL IT WORK WITH DIFFERENT SCREEN SIZES?

CDN.net will serve any static content regardless of the device or browser your visitors use. We recommend using JW Player and Wowza Media Server 3 for advanced video on demand functionality.

HOW DO I SET UP A CDN RESOURCE?

  1. Select “Dashboard” – The dashboard displays your current balance and any other CDN resources you have created
  2. Click “Create” – The create button is just under the balance and you can see it also under packages
  3. Enter the “Origin Hostname” – The origin hostname is the URL where your content is stored e.e example.com
  4. Enter the “CDN Hostname” – The CDN Hostname is the URL including a subdomain e.g. www.example.com
  5. Update your CNAME records – We generate a CNAME record that you must add through your hosting provider’s DNS Editor in a control panel e.g. 12345678.r.worldcdn.net

WHAT DNS RECORDS DO I NEED TO CHANGE?

You will just need to change the CNAME record of the CDN hostname.

Standard Configuration

CDN Resource

Origin Hostname domain.com
CDN Hostname www.domain.com

 

DNS Records

Record Type Entry Points to
A record domain.com 100.190.1.4
CNAME record www.domain.com 12345678.r.worldcdn.net

HOW CAN I GET SUPPORT?

We free offer weekday support via help.cdn.net and typically respond quickly to most incidents. We have a dedicated team to support you with setting up all the way to break-fix and complex requests. For customers needed proactive monitoring and dedicated support, we offer paid Premium Support.

HOW CAN I CHECK MY BALANCE?

You will be notified by email when your prepay balance is approaching 10% and have up to 3 years to use any prepaid credit. You can check your prepay balance by logging into your Dashboard..

MANAGE CDN RESOURCES

Edit – you can edit your CDN resource here and change hostnames

Configuration – if you need to change your CNAME record you can find the link here

Purge – this function allows you to instantly purge individual files from the cache

Prefetch – this function allows you to upload larger files to the cache in anticipation of traffic spikes

SSL – you can request a custom SSL domain to encrypt content or set up a CDN resource using our shared SSL certificate for free where the CDN Hostname is example.r.worldssl.net

Delete – you can remove any CDN resource however this will disable access to cached content

MANAGE ACCOUNT DETAILS

Edit package – under “Packages” you select “View details” and “Edit”. This will display the $/GB.

Receipts – you can see your receipt under “Transactions” for proof of purchase

Edit email – you can edit the account holder’s details and administrator’s email address

Reports – check your usage and filter by time, locations and resources in graph form or download as a .CSV format