Creating a zone

A zone is one origin, the hostnames that serve it and the cache in front of them: each of our locations asks your origin for a file once and serves every later viewer from its copy. A new zone answers on its default hostname as soon as it is saved, and files of any kind and size go through it.

What a zone needs#

• A name: 4 to 40 letters and digits. It is lower-cased and becomes the zone's default hostname, myzone.zone.cg-cdn.com for a zone named myzone, so it has to be a name nobody else is using.
• An origin type. Standard origin (public HTTP or HTTPS): a web server or object store open to the internet. Private S3 bucket (signed requests): a bucket closed to the public, read with keys you give the zone; see Private bucket origins. Full site (reverse proxy): a whole website, where anything a visitor sends with a cookie or a login goes straight through and the files the site serves identically to everyone are cached; read Full site origins before choosing it, because it changes what is cached.
• The origin's address: a scheme, a hostname or IP address, and a port if it is not the default, such as https://origin.example.com or http://203.0.113.10:8080. A path is optional: with https://origin.example.com/library/ a file asked for as /intro.mp4 is fetched from /library/intro.mp4. No query string and no credentials. A private or local address saves, but the edge cannot connect to it and every request answers the 502 page. A bucket needs its endpoint, region, name and a key pair that can read it instead.
• An account whose CDN pages are unlocked, which takes your company details, the agreement our team enters and a payment card. See Billing and invoices.

What is created#

Creating the zone also creates its CDN Zone ID (nine letters and digits such as AB12CD34E, which never changes and is how the API names it), the default hostname with SSL on, and a signing key for token authentication, which stays off until you switch it on. The default hostname's certificate is issued within a minute or two; until it is, an HTTPS connection to that name fails, so test over HTTP or wait a moment. Your own hostnames go beside it with a CNAME, each with a certificate of its own: see Hostnames and certificates.

Verify Origin SSL Certificate starts off, so an HTTPS origin is not authenticated until you switch it on; Strip Response Cookies starts on, which is right for a folder of files and wrong for an application that sets a session cookie. Zone settings has every setting and what it starts as.

Test it#

Ask for a file twice. The first request is fetched from your origin, the second is served from the edge:

curl -sI http://myzone.zone.cg-cdn.com/videos/intro.mp4

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Age: 0
Content-Length: 4194304
Content-Type: video/mp4
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:02:11 GMT
Etag: "68d1b3f7-400000"
Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:15:03 GMT
Link: <https://origin.example.com/videos/intro.mp4>; rel="canonical"
Server: CacheGenie CDN
X-CDN-Cache: MISS
X-CDN-Location: alpha1
X-CDN-Name: CacheGenie CDN
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff

Run it again and X-CDN-Cache reads HIT, with Age saying how many seconds ago the copy was stored. X-CDN-Location names the location that answered: the status page lists every location with its state, and the API's Locations list has their ids. The Link header is the Add Canonical Headers switch at work. Over HTTP/2 your client prints the names in lower case; they mean the same. Headers lists every header we add.

In your origin's log the same request is a GET carrying Via: 1.1 CacheGenie-CDN with our signed marker after it, the viewer's own User-Agent, the viewer's address in X-Forwarded-For and X-CDN-Connecting-IP, our entry in CDN-Loop, and a Range header asking for the first 10 MB. Every file is first fetched that way, so a 206 in your origin's log is normal. See Video and large files.

There is no limit on the number of zones and no charge for one: the invoice is for bandwidth delivered to your viewers, at the rate agreed with our team and subject to any monthly minimum on your agreement. There is no cache preloading either; the first viewer's request for a file in each location fetches it. Limits has the numbers that do apply.