Add a CDN Zone

CDN zones are part of the Content Delivery Network’s architecture where the content is located for distribution or from which the content is to be distributed.

Creating or adding a CDN zone requires you to specify the location of your files. There are three available options – your files are located at your own server (Custom location), in the Universal CDN Cloud Storage container (UCDN Storage), or you can set your Amazon S3 storage as origin if your files are located there.

To create a CDN zone, follow the steps outlined below:

1. Log in to the Universal CDN Control Panel at my.ucdn.com.

2. Navigate to the My Zones tab located in the top left corner.

3. Navigate to the New File zone button located in the top right corner.

4. Specify the location of your files.

5. Specify the size of your resources.

Universal CDN allows the resources to be stored in the following locations:

UCDN Storage

Instead of storing your content on your own server, you can store it on Universal Cloud Storage Servers in two locations – in Europe and North America.

Custom location

The Universal CDN will pull the data from your own server on request and then cache it for the specified time.

You need to enter the scheme (HTTP/HTTPS), the host address of your origin, and the port that should be used.

You can add more than one origin by clicking on the Add origin button and specify the origin weights.

Weighted load balancing allows you to set a relative weight for each origin (or backup origin) server in a CDN zone. The weights determine the amount of traffic sent to available origins within a CDN zone.

If the specified origin became unhealthy, the traffic will be rebalanced to the remaining available origins (if any) following their respective weights.

IMPORTANT! When setting up the weight of the origins, please note the following:

– The default weight is 100.

– The value of each origin’s weight must be between 1 and 100 (only integers are accepted as weight values).

– If no weight is entered, the default value of 100 will be assigned to the origin, distributing traffic equally among the active origins.

– Same rules will be applied to the BackUp Endpoints (Backup origin).

There are two more optional features that can be enabled for your custom location:

1. HTTP access is protected – Check this option if your origin requires authentication in order for the files to be accessed. You will have to enter a valid username/password.

2. Make UCDN access my origin using this host header – Define a different host header with which your origin will be accessed.

Backup Endpoints

By configuring multiple Origins or Backup Origin servers, you can ensure continuous content delivery in the event of server errors or issues.

– Origin to Origin (Response to 5XX Server Errors):

In cases, where the origin server is either unable to establish a connection, or encounters 5xx series errors (such as 500 Internal Server Error, 502 Bad Gateway, 503 Service Unavailable, 504 Gateway Timeout), UCDN will automatically redirect requests to the next origin server.

These server-side errors typically indicate problems with the primary server’s ability to process requests, triggering our system to switch to the next origin to maintain content availability.

– Origin to Backup Origin (Response to 4XX HTTP Errors):

When UCDN encounters 4xx series errors (404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden, or 429 Too Many Requests) from the origin server, it automatically initiates a failover process and forwards the requests to a predefined backup origin server.

This mechanism ensures that even if the primary origin server is experiencing issues that result in the specified client error responses, your content will remain accessible through the backup server.