Integrating your Dynamic CDN Resource (Aksela)
Log in to Medianova Cloud by entering your e-mail address and password.
Click on “CDN → Create CDN Resource” option from the menu on the left side of the panel.
Select “Dynamic” CDN Resource and fill in the requested fields.
Specify your CDN Resource Name. Note that the CDN Resource name will be used in the CDN URL. (Example: cdnresource_name.mncdn.com)
Enter the complete path to your origin server or IP Address in Origin URL section. Origin URL describes the location of your content.
Enter your Website URL (Example: yourdomain.com ). Make sure to write the full domain name of your website.
Enter descriptive label for the CDN Resource you have created.
Your Origin URL and Website URL cannot be identical. To differentiate your Origin URL from your Website URL, you can follow one of the two following methods:
Login to your DNS hosting provider’s client panel and add an A record that points your origin address (different than the Website URL) on your DNS server. This will be the origin URL for Aksela to retrieve your site’s content.
Example: Origin URL - yourdomain.com
Fill in the Origin URL field using the IP address information instead of a URL. In that case, the Website URL has to be filled in the Origin Set header. This can be configured in CDN Resources → Headers settings, after Aksela CDN Resource is created.
Example: Origin URL - https://IP.IP.IP.IP
Origin Set Header - yourdomain.com
Click on the CDN Resource menu, select the CDN Resource you created and move to the Caching menu.
First you need to configure the Cache Settings at the bottom of the page. Cache Type field provides two options.
- If you would like to use the cache time defined on the origin with the cache-control header, you can select “Origin”. If you would like to set custom cache time, you can select “Edge”.
- When you select Edge, you should set the cache time, which indicates the maximum age of your cached content. Then you should also specify if you would like to cache dynamic content such as your HTML files and click the Save Changes button.
b. Next, you need to check your Query String Caching settings. You can leave the Query String setting disabled, if you would like to cache your files by ignoring query strings; or you can enable it to treat each query string as a cacheable item.
If “Cache Dynamic Pages” option under Cache Settings has been enabled at Step 4.1, that means all HTML files served by your origin and all resources (CSS, images, JavaScript) found in HTML files, will be cached and served through Medianova CDN.
However, it is recommended to exclude some of the HTML files which contain private information (such as account details, credit card information on check out page etc.). Below are two options to disallow caching, either by defining paths or by using cookies.
a. Disallow Caching by Defining Paths:
- Go to the Page Rules menu and enter custom paths to bypass caching under “Disallow Cache Rule” setting.
b. Disallow Caching by Using Cookies:
- Go to the Caching menu and enter Cookie Key & Cookie Value to bypass caching under “Disallow Cookie Base Cache” setting.
Go to the SSL menu and upload your SSL certificate.
You can test your Aksela account before redirecting your Website URL to your CDN URL, and serving traffic through our platform.
To start testing, first you need to find the IP address of the CDN URL. In order to do that, you can ping your CDN URL on Command prompt.
Example: ping cdnresource_name.mncdn.com
b. Then, you need to add this IP address to your hosts file.
- Open the Run tab by pressing Windows key + R.
- Type system32 in the search bar and click ok.
- On the screen, go to the “drivers” folder and then to the “etc” folder.
- Under the “etc” folder, you can right-click on your “hosts” file and select open and edit with application such as Notepad or Notepad++.
- Please add the IP address you obtained in the first step and the website you want to reach using this IP address to the file and save it.
c. Clear your browser cache. Make a request to the page by typing yourdomain.com in the address bar. On the page that opens, right-click on an empty area and select “inspect”. Go to the “Network” tab and find your Website URL within the list of requests. Click on it and and display the information in the “Headers -> Response Headers” area. Seeing “MNCDN” next to the “Server” field shows that the .html file is served from Medianova.
After completing the test successfully, login to your DNS hosting provider’s client panel and add a CNAME record for redirecting your Site URL to the CDN URL you have created.
yourdomain.com IN CNAME cdnresource_name.mncdn.com
Your traffic is now served through Medianova Aksela.