Pull Zone FAQ

Contents

What is a Pull Zone?

A Pull Zone is what is needed to utilize the HTTP Caching type of CDN. The name Pull Zone came from the technique used, as we “Pull” the static assets from your website to cache it and serve it from our CDN Network.
Pull Zones are simple to set up and use. It takes 1 minute or less to create a Pull Zone, and depending on your website, the steps necessary to implement the CDN on your website, will vary.

Is Pull Zone right for me?

Pull Zones are meant to serve small-size static assets for websites. That includes Stylesheets (.css), images, Java Script files, text files, and small PDFs. As long as each individual static file is smaller than 10 Megabytes, a Pull Zone can serve it.

What can I NOT use a Pull Zone for?

What can I NOT use a Pull Zone for?
Any file over 10 Megabytes of size, Media Streaming, or dynamic content are not supported on our Pull Zones.

Can I use a Pull Zone with Amazon Web Services such as S3, CloudFront, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancer?

Yes! Pull Zones are designed to work with any publicly available web server or storage network. If your files are reachable via normal HTTP Requests, a Pull Zone can work. (Our CDN can also be configured to work with HTTPS websites)

Are Pull Zones provisioned in all the CDN Network Locations real-time?

Yes, the Pull Zone setup configuration in the CDN Control Panel is designed to create and provision zones immediately in real-time.

How do I create a Pull Zone?

Please refer to our Pull Zone Creation Tutorial, here

What is the Origin URL?

The “Origin” is the destination on which your static assets are hosted/located, and from which we will Pull and Cache your files.
The Origin URL can be your domain name, your S3/CloudFront Bucket URL, your Rackspace Cloud Files URL, or any publicly accessible URL

Can you pull contents from a Password-Protected Directory?

No, unless the contents are publicly available, we cannot pull them.

How frequently do cached files expire?

The default TTL (time to live) is 24 hours from the time when the file is initially cached. However, if the files are given an expiry header on the (Origin) server on which they are hosted, using .htaccess or httpd.conf for example, we will honor the expiry header.

Do you honor headers appended to contents on the origin server such as Cache Control, Vary, and Expires etc..?

Yes, we do. We will cache the file as it is, with all its headers.

Do you use any cache enhancement mechanisms?

Yes, we utilize Memcached.

What kind of web server do you run?

We use NginX to serve our CDN cached content.

Will you support .htaccess or its equivalent on the Pull Zone?

Unfortunately we are not currently able to support custom .htaccess on our Pull Zones.

What is a Custom CDN Domain?

A custom CDN Domain is a CName that points to our netdna-cdn.com branded CDN URL. It can be something like:
CName —–> CDN temp URL
cdn.yourdomain.com zonename.company.netdna-cdn.com

How can I create and use a Custom CDN (CName) Domain to serve my CDN content?

First, add the Custom Domain (CName) to the Pull Zone configuration under the “Settings“ tab inside the CDN Control Panel.
Second, create a CNAME DNS Record that points to our temporary CDN URL. **Note: It is important to create a CName, NOT a Subdomain.

What is the Temporary CDN URL?

It is the URL that will be automatically created when you create a Zone. It is called “temporary” because most clients use it temporarily until they have created a CNAME to use on their website (explained above). However, you are free to always use the temporary URL (the CDN temp URL will not expire unless the zone or account is deleted).

Do you allow blocking certain countries or IP blocks from downloading/viewing my files?

Unfortunately, no. We do not have this blacklist functionality at this time.

Do you support Secure Tokens for Pull Zones, like S3?

We do. However, this is a feature available on the NetDNA Enterprise platform and is not currently available on MaxCDN or CloudCache.

Can I serve my entire website on a Pull Zone?

This setup is exclusive to the NetDNA Enterprise platform and is not available on MaxCDN or CloudCache.

Can I override the default cache expiry time?

Yes. You can do that under the “Advanced Settings” tab in the CDN Control Panel, which is visible when you are managing your zone. Alternatively, you can set an expiry header on your origin server.

How do I set a custom expiry header on my Apache server?

Please refer to our Custom Expiry Headers tutorial.

I’m using the Amazon Elastic (EC2) Load Balancing; Can I still use it after I switch to you CDN solution?

Yes, Pull Zones are designed to accommodate Load Balancers. **Note: Please contact our support team and request to have ‘Origin IP Resolution’ turned on for each zone that is using a Load Balanced Origin.

I’m using CloudFlare, can I combine that with your CDN Service?

Yes, you can. Please refer to our tutorial on working CDN with CloudFlare

Is it possible to strip/override all headers appended to my static assets on the Origin Server?

Yes, our Control Panel has an option that allows you to strip all headers, the option can be found under “Advanced Settings”.

Do you offer CDN Integration for my website that runs WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Prestashop, or Social Engine?

There are supported plugins for most popular CMS (Content Management Systems), and many others. Instructions on how to use and configure these plugins can be found on our Pull Zone dropdown on the support site.

What if my website is custom made using PHP/ASP/Ruby etc…?

In such case, the only way to integrate CDN functionality is by using Custom Integration

My website uses an SSL Certificate? Does your CDN support that?

Yes. We provide Custom SSL hosting services. This can be purchased through the Control Panel and will allow you to use SSL on your own CName.
We also offer a free Shared SSL Certificate, which provides you a Temporary CDN URL with HTTPS Support.

Can I use .htaccess or its equivalent for NginX or IIS to integrate CDN into my website?

No, you can’t. Technically, you can forward all your requests for static assets to the CDN URL for each one. However, doing that will simply beat the purpose of using CDN as all requests will still go to your webserver before forwarding to the CDN. This will not deliver the performance results you should expect from using the CDN solely. It adds unnecessary hops between the request and content retrieval. It will also negatively affect your page load speed, SEO and Page Rank since redirects will slow your website down.

Google is crawling the CDN URL and I now have duplicate content, what can I do to prevent that?

You can enable the ‘Custom Robots.txt’ option under “Advanced Settings” if using the old CP Control Panel, or “SEO” if using CP3. This option will prevent browsers from crawling content served on your pull zone and will prevent Google from flagging it as duplicate content.
Alternatively, you can use a subdirectory as your origin, in which all your static assets will be saved. Something like www.domain.com/assets/, and under /assets/ you have you css/js etc… With this as your Origin, the CDN url itself will show a blank page and nothing will be crawled.

Is there a specific UserAgent that will identify traffic coming from your network?

We pass on the client’s UserAgent rather than our own, so there is no “Special” NetDNA/MaxCDN/CloudCache UserAgent based identification.
However, if you need to filter traffic coming from our servers, contact our support team to get a list of subnets to use for filtering traffic.

Internet Explorer is not caching my files because of the VARY Header, but other browsers are! What do I do?

Add “BrowserMatch “MSIE” force-no-vary” to your .htaccess file or its equivalent for NginX/IIS in order to unset the vary header and allow your content to be cached properly.

Can your CDN keep my website online if my web server goes down?

Our CDN will keep serving all static content that is directly requested, but if your Origin is unreachable, we will not be able to keep the website up, since that is not being served from our network.