Zones

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.

Every setting a zone has is on its page in the NOC. A switch saves the moment it is clicked; the Origin Details and Blocking boxes save with their own buttons.

A private bucket origin lets a zone pull from a bucket that is closed to the public.

A full site zone puts a whole website behind the CDN. A request a visitor makes with a cookie or a login goes straight through to your web server, the files your site serves identically to everyone are cached and shared, and a page asked for by a...

An origin certificate is a certificate we make for one zone, for you to install on your origin server.

A tunnel puts a server that cannot be reached from the internet behind the CDN. You run a small program, the connector, on a machine that can reach the server;

Your own hostname on a zone is a CNAME to the zone's default hostname, plus a certificate we issue once that CNAME is live. In that order: point the DNS first, then switch SSL on, and the certificate arrives within a minute or two.

The origin shield puts one of our locations between your origin and the rest of the network. With a Home PoP chosen, only that location fetches from your origin;

Token authentication makes a zone serve only links your own application has signed. Each link carries the time it expires at, so a link that is shared on stops working by itself, and a request without a valid signature is refused with 403.

Maintenance mode takes one zone offline on purpose. While it is on, every location answers requests for that zone with a maintenance page instead of asking your origin (a certificate challenge is the one exception, below), and switching it off bri...

Blocking lets a zone refuse traffic you do not want. You set the rules on the zone and every location enforces them, so a refused request never reaches your origin and never costs you bandwidth.