General Overview

Distribution is the delivery network with groups of servers to accelerate your content on the web.

It is a building block for your CDN setup that has a unique name to list in the distributions page and a Domain/IP addresses for accessing your origin servers. You can configure a secure connection between your users and MerlinCDN and also between MerlinCDN and your origins. Where your content will be delivered is determined by the selecting Zones.

The main properties of distribution are explained below.

1. Distribution Types

Static

The contents that are changed rarely, assets like CSS, JS, images, and fonts.

Dynamic

Contents that are changed frequently, assets like HTML, JSON, and texts.

Distribution Type cannot be updated later. Pricing changes based on Distribution Type.

2. Distribution Details

Name

Name must be a unique name that identifies your distribution. MerlinCDN creates a default hostname for your distribution where your content will be accessible. You can also specify a custom hostname, manage your CNAMEs and SSL preferences.

Origin Server Address

Origin server URL is the endpoint for MerlinCDN to get files in your distributions. MerlinCDN will redirect requests to your Origin servers only when visitors request content that is not yet cached or updated or must not be cached. More on this in Cache Settings.

3. Pricing Zones

Zones refer to MerlinCDN edge server locations that will be used to respond to requests from your visitors. Your choice of Pricing Zones has a direct effect on the performance of your distribution. Pricing changes depending on the selected Zone. More information on Pricing Zones is available under Guidelines.

4. Network Type

You can specify how MerlinCDN should access your Origin servers. If your origin supports HTTPS, select HTTPS to implement secure connections to your origin server(s). If not, select HTTP. If you configure HTTPS with MerlinCDN, it can request content from the Origin server over HTTP and require end-users to use HTTPS when accessing your files in your MerlinCDN distributions.

MerlinCDN automatically pulls content from your origin server and caches it on MerlinCDN global network. This way, once the content is cached in MerlinCDN,  visitor requests routed to the nearest possible edge server location without a request to your Origin. You can add multiple Origin servers to a distribution and manage failover by setting active and backup servers.