Right in their Qrator Labs personal dashboard, customers can connect and configure the RuGeeks CDN service.

Domain and certificate

To use a CDN, you need to set up your site such that a separate domain could be used for static content. User requests to this domain will be handled by the RuGeeks service, downloading it from your upstream and updating it as needed.

RuGeeks automatically creates for each site a domain that can be used for these purposes. However, customers often want static content to be hosted on their own domain, for example, a certain subdomain of the main domain. In this case, a CNAME record must be created in the appropriate DNS zone.

When accessing the domain via HTTPS, the certificate specified by the customer will be used. You can use any certificate pre-loaded in the certificate storage in your personal dashboard.

Header settings

Although CDN does not modify the body of the content it caches, it is often necessary for CDN to add some sort of HTTP header to a user request or upstream response. RuGeeks CDN can add arbitrary headers that are described in your dashboard.

Also, RuGeeks CDN can specify the user's source IP address in a special header, whose name you can configure in your dashboard.

URL blacklist and whitelist

The customer can set up a blacklist of URLs to which CDNs will respond with an error code without requesting content from Qrator Labs. The specific error code is configured by the customer individually for each URL.

The customer can also create a whitelist of URLs, if necessary. In this case, CDN will request content only from URLs on that list and respond with an error code to all others. The default error code is 404 Not Found, but it can be overridden on a per-page basis using a blacklist.

Caching settings

Efficient caching is the main task of CDN, and it is important that it is done correctly, taking into account the content structure on the site. Therefore, the customer can configure how CDN will handle HTTP header Cache-Control in the dashboard, as well as enable or disable caching of certain types of errors. The customer can also enable CDN to ignore all GET request parameters. For example, this is handy if you rely on randomly generated GET parameters to force the browser to update cached content, but don't want that to result in extra CDN requests to upstream.

In some cases, it may be useful to remove some files from the cache after updating upstream content or making significant changes to caching settings. This can be done through your dashboard.

You can ask the Qrator Labs tech support team to force cache and update some content on the CDN (to perform the so-called CDN warmup) without waiting for the content to be first requested by users. This is useful if you have a lot of content updated on the source server. Without pre-caching, it may take longer for first time users to download new content because the CDN will not yet have cached content and the cache will slowly fill up.

These settings are made in CDN (RuGeeks) → Settings → Caching Settings in the personal dashboard.

##Converting images

You can use auto-conversion of images to WebP to speed up the site. The WebP format provides a smaller file size with comparable image quality. You can have auto-conversion enabled and configured by the tech support on request. The original versions of images also remain in the cache.

When auto-conversion is enabled, RuGeeks CDN analyzes the User-Agent header in the user's request to determine their browser version. If this browser version supports WebP, the user is sent a WebP version of these images instead of JPEG images. If the user's browser version does not support WebP or the version is unknown, CDN sends the original version of the image unchanged.

Transport settings

By default, traffic between RuGeeks and Qrator Labs is transmitted over HTTP/1.1. You can enable HTTP/2 to provide more efficient traffic through header compression, request multiplexing and some other techniques. Before switching from one protocol to another, you should consult with Qrator Labs technical support to avoid incorrect operation when switching.

For both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, you can choose the stream compression format to use. RuGeeks supports gzip, deflate, br and uncompressed streaming formats. You can switch between them in your dashboard.

These settings are made in the CDN (RuGeeks) → Settings → Caching Settings section in the dashboard.