Setting up a CDN to work with your website is easy and can be done in just a few steps. The article “How Does a CDN Work” is a recommended read if you are not yet familiar with a Content Delivery Network.

Pull Zones are the most commonly used Zone Type and are the recommended method for most CDN users. With this method, the CDN automatically pulls static content from your origin server and caches it on the edge servers. Once the content is cached, visitor requests will be routed and delivered from the nearest possible edge server location.

choose a zone type

To get started with your KeyCDN integration, complete the following 3 steps.

  1. Create Your Zone

Creating a KeyCDN zone is easy. Login to your KeyCDN Dashboard, navigate to Zones and select Add New Zone. Then, follow the steps below to create your first zone.

  1. Choose a Zone Name
  2. Select Zone Type “Pull”
  3. Define your origin URL
  4. Enable “Show Advanced Features”, find the SSL section and select Shared, then click Save
  5. Wait approximately 5 minutes for the zone to fully deploy

Alternatively, using a Push Zone is recommended for uploading files greater than 10MB in size and is required for files larger than 100MB (Pull Zones do not cache anything over 100MB).

  1. Check Your CDN Assets

Once your Zone is fully deployed, you’ll want to check an asset to see if it is properly accessible via the CDN.

  1. Choose one of your website’s static asset URLs
    Example: https://yourwebsite.com/assets/css/style.css
  2. Replace the origin URL with your new KeyCDN Zone URL
  3. Access your new CDN URL in a browser or use a cURL command in your CLI to verify the asset returns a 200 status
    Example: https://yourzone-1c6b.kxcdn.com/assets/css/style.css

    curl -I https://yourzone-1c6b.kxcdn.com/assets/css/style.css
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: keycdn-engine
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 17:47:52 GMT
Content-Type: image/webp
Content-Length: 6352
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 23:56:22 GMT
ETag: "18d0-52f61026f0829"
Expires: Thu, 23 Jun 2016 17:47:52 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Link: <http://yourwebsite.com/assets/css/style.css>; rel="canonical"
X-Cache: HIT
X-Edge-Location: usny
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Accept-Ranges: bytes

Once you have verified that your assets are accessible via the CDN URL, you can move on to the next step of integrating KeyCDN with your website.

  1. Integrate the CDN with Your Website

The following integration guides will help you to quickly integrate KeyCDN into your web projects: