Before You Access CDN

Before using CDN acceleration, learn about concepts of acceleration domain names and origin servers, billing, security, and how to verify the acceleration effect. This helps you quickly enable and use CDN.

Domain Name and Origin Server

Prepare a domain name for acceleration and an origin server (service server) based on the domain name admission conditions, content moderation requirements, and domain name description in the Restrictions.

Billing Options

Understanding CDN billing details helps you select a proper billing option when enabling CDN and reduce costs.

Huawei Cloud CDN charges fees for traffic or bandwidth generated when users access CDN points of presence (PoPs) on a pay-per-use basis.

**Table 1** Billing options
Billing Item	Billed By	Description
Basic service fee	Traffic	Suits you if your domain name traffic curve fluctuates greatly, bandwidth usage is always less than 30%, and the bandwidth has a peak. You can buy traffic packages of appropriate specifications to save money. For details, see Prepaid Traffic Packages.
	Peak bandwidth	Suits you if your domain name's daily bandwidth usage is always greater than 30% and the traffic curve is stable. Requires account top-ups. The monthly usage fee will be deducted from your account balance. Submit a service ticket to request this billing option.
	95th percentile bandwidth	Suits you if your service traffic is heavy and your monthly expenditure will be greater than $15,000 USD. Contact your account manager and request these billing options.
	Average daily peak bandwidth

Resource Type and Service Type

CDN caches content to speed up content delivery. It caches static resources on CDN PoPs so that users can get the resources from the nearest PoP. Whole site acceleration speeds up the transmission of dynamic and pseudo-static resources through network routing.

**Table 2** Resource types
Resource Type	Description
Static	The same file is obtained for each request. Examples: images, videos, files (HTML, CSS, and JS) on websites, software installation packages, APK files, and compressed packages
Dynamic	Different files are obtained for each request. Examples: files (ASP, JSP, PHP, PERL, and CGI) on websites, APIs, and database interaction requests
Pseudo-static	Pseudo-static resources, such as HTML files, appear to be static on websites, but are actually processed using dynamic scripts such as ASP. Pseudo-static resources are essentially dynamic and are processed as dynamic content.

CDN provides four service types. Select a service type based on the resource characteristics of your website to achieve better acceleration.

**Table 3** Service types
Service Type	Scenario
Website	Web portals, e-commerce platforms, news apps, and user generated content (UGC)-focused apps
File download	Download clients, game clients, app stores, and websites that provide download services based on HTTP or HTTPS
On-demand services	On-demand video/audio services, such as online education websites, video sharing websites, TV VOD platforms, and music and video apps
Whole site	Websites that consist of both dynamic and static content and for sites with abundant ASP, JSP, or PHP requests

Service Area

CDN provides three service areas. Select one based on the distribution of your end users to improve user experience.

Service Area	Acceleration Effect	Scenario
Chinese mainland	All user requests are scheduled to PoPs in the Chinese mainland.	Users are centrally distributed in the Chinese mainland.
Outside Chinese mainland	All user requests are scheduled to PoPs outside the Chinese mainland.	Users are centrally distributed outside the Chinese mainland.
Global	User requests are scheduled to the optimal CDN PoP nearby.	Users are distributed around the world.

Outside Chinese mainland indicates countries and regions other than the Chinese mainland. Hong Kong (China), Macao (China), and Taiwan (China) are included.
The service area of a domain name has nothing to do with the origin location. You can choose the service area that suits your services best.

(Optional) Security

If your website has high security requirements, configure security settings to prevent malicious traffic or attacks.

Function	Description
HTTPS certificate	Enable HTTPS acceleration to encrypt requests between clients and CDN PoPs, securing data transmission.
Access control	Identity and filter visitors using referer validation, IP address access control lists (ACLs), token authentication, and User-Agent ACLs, restrict access sources, and prevent malicious traffic and attacks.

Acceleration Effect Evaluation

You can use a third-party dialing test tool to test the response speed of websites. The test method is as follows:

Test the response speed of accessing a resource after CDN acceleration is used.
Test the response speed of accessing the same resource directly from the origin server.
Compare the preceding two data.

Important notes:

If you test the access to an uncached resource, CDN needs to pull it from the origin server. Accessing it through CDN will be more time-consuming. Use a cached resource for test.
This solution is used for qualitative analysis on the acceleration effect. If you require professional evaluation, contact professional analysis platforms (such as Tingyun and Bonree).
- This solution is for reference only. The final interpretation and copyright belong to third-party websites used for testing. The websites do not belong to Huawei Cloud. Please be careful when visiting them.

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