Secure CDN – Fast, Safe Content Delivery

With many search engines now determining your page rank based on both how fast your site loads and how securely your visitors can browse your web site, it is more important than ever to secure transmission to and from your web site as well as deliver your web site content as quickly as possible.

Your web site content is not just a single web page; it is made up of many different elements; images, Javascript, stylesheets, even video, pdfs and audio. These put load on your web site’s delivery mechanism; not just the web server you are serving your web site from, but also on your internet bandwidth.

Don’t have knowledge of PEM generation, CA chaining and SSL ciphering? You will probably find setting up a CDN to be a very time-consuming and head-banging experience.

Implementing a content delivery network (or CDN) is the number one way to deliver your web site using the fastest means necessary. A CDN allows your web site to deliver all of the extra pieces that make up your web site from locations often much closer to the user than your web site and over communication channels which can handle much more data than your average web host.

However, delivering images or Javascript via a CDN is only part of the solution; you also need to secure the communication of those assets between the CDN and the user’s web browser otherwise you can expect your site to look like it is from 1997 as the web browser blocks insecure content from being loaded. CDNs do offer wildcard certificates but you can expect your urls to look something like https://34dfed0sd34md8d.mycdn.com. This is ugly for site users, difficult for programmers to remember and very poor for search engine optimization, not to mention if the CDN changes you will need to update your web application to use this new location, potentially breaking your web site whilst the CDN updates.

Again, there is a solution for this. By setting up your web site address to routing requests to the CDN, you can have a nice looking url such as https://cdn.knowledgearc.com. However, this is complex and frustrating to set up, even for some of the most technically minded  (expect to be browsing raw network packets with Wireshark to debug potential problems). If you don’t have knowledge of PEM generation, CA chaining and SSL ciphering and distinguishing between the various versions of TLS, you will probably find setting up a CDN to be a very time-consuming and head-banging experience.