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Even if you are using a CDN, you still need to manage certificates on your origin server (or load balancer). The common rule for CDNs is: if they receive encrypted traffic, they will transmit encrypted traffic to the origin. Fair enough.

While some CDNs offer options to send traffic to a plain HTTP port (like port 80 on Cloudflare or the deprecated “protocol downgrade” on Akamai), this is not recommended. Therefore, your origin server should be configured to handle encrypted HTTPS traffic.

Sometimes it happens that you’re looking for a solution, analyzing many websites and the information on them. After many hours, you find one that seems suitable, you want to know the price, and instead you see a “Contact Sales” button. Why do they do this? Why not just publish the prices on the website?

If you have ever felt the frustration of this situation, know that you are not alone. But from a business perspective, the “Contact Sales” button is not a barrier, but rather a form of qualification and the start of the work. Especially for complex B2B products like a CDN, hiding the price is a deliberate and often logical choice.

A long time ago, interviewers loved to ask, “Tell me in detail what happens when a user enters a website address and tries to open it.” While it’s beyond our scope to describe every single stage in full detail, we can examine a small but critical part of it: how a website address is mapped to a CDN node, of which there can be thousands around the world. An incorrect mapping can lead to slow loading times, stalled image rendering, and a frustrating user experience. Let’s delve into the details.