How a CDN Works
What actually happens between your origin and a user's browser, and what it takes to put BlazingCDN in front of your files.
First: is this network even for you?
BlazingCDN is a paid, per-terabyte network built for heavy traffic. There is no free tier and no self-serve signup: a zone is configured with an engineer, for your content. Below roughly 5 TB a month the saving is too small to be worth anyone’s migration, ours included.
Read on if
- You move terabytes a month, not gigabytes: video, game builds, installers, archives
- You already have an origin, and you can change the links your project serves
- A CNAME record and a cache TTL are things you set, not things you look up first
- Volume drives your bill, not the number of requests
- You want a written rate for your volume before any call
If that is your traffic, the rest of this page is the whole setup: what a zone is, what we ask for, and what changes on your side. The rate is published, so you can price it before writing to us.
Look elsewhere if
- You are looking for a free CDN. We do not have a free tier, and we are not planning one
- You move under 5 TB a month, where the saving never covers the migration
- Your traffic is mostly HTML pages and API calls rather than large files
- You want DNS, WAF, bot management and CDN in one console, managed for you
Cloudflare does all four of those well, and their free tier is a genuinely good place to start. Come back when the terabytes start showing up on your invoice. See how the two compare.
Two ways a CDN can sit in front of your files
Most teams meet a CDN as a proxy that swallows the whole domain. That is one model. It is not ours, and the difference decides what you have to hand over.
The proxy model
Everything you serve goes through them
Your domain moves behind their network. Pages, API calls, logins and video are all terminated on their edge, which is exactly why the security tooling can work. It also means your nameservers, your certificates and every byte you serve now live with one vendor.
Our model: the pull zone
We answer only for the files you point at us
We are not in front of your site. You keep your domain and your nameservers where they are and give the zone a hostname of its own. We answer for the files you send to it: video segments, installers, images, archives. The rest of your traffic never touches our network, and rolling us back is one CNAME.
This is also why we never sell ourselves as your security layer. We move bytes at volume, at a published price per terabyte. If you need a WAF, keep the one you have and run us beside it.
What a zone actually looks like
The configuration itself is small. Four things decide how your files are served, and none of them require changing your infrastructure.
1. Where your originals live
Identify the address your files are served from today, for example yourdomain.com. That stays exactly where it is.
2. The zone and its origin
- A CDN zone is created for you in the panel, and you keep full access to it afterwards.
- In the Origin field goes the root of your link without the file path:
yourdomain.com.
3. The CDN domain
- The zone gets its own hostname, for example
cdn000000..blazingcdn.net - Your file is then served as
cdn000000. You can also put your own domain on the zone with your own SSL certificate..blazingcdn.net /file.mp4
4. What an origin can be
- A domain, as in the example above.
- An IP address, if your content sits on a specific host.
- A domain with a port, if it is served somewhere other than 80 or 443.
- Object storage: S3, Swift, Rsync, Wasabi or our own Cloud Storage.
From there the edge answers your users and your origin only sees cache misses, which on a normal library means it is contacted roughly once per file per TTL per region.
The same zone, four kinds of traffic
Which product a zone runs on depends on what you deliver. The path the bytes take changes. The rate card does not.
Anycast CDN
Static files, pulled once, served everywhere
Images, videos, streaming, scripts, installers, software. Your origin is asked for a file roughly once per region per TTL, not once per user.
Video CDN
Your library lives inside the network
Playback stops depending on your origin staying awake, because the files already sit in the network. Signed URLs and tokens keep them from being lifted. Encoding and packaging stay on your side.
Video CDN or the setup guide
Files on Demand
Large downloads, released on your terms
Installers, patches, game builds, archives, fonts. Access can be limited by signed link, IP or country, so a release does not leak early and a day one patch does not take your origin down.
HLS Streaming CDN
Live segments, your media server
Keep Red5 Pro, Ant Media or whatever writes your playlists, and hand us the link. We carry the manifest and the segments at scale. We do not encode or transcode: delivery is the job.
Streaming CDN or the setup guide
All four sit on the same rate card, from $5 down to $2.50 per TB. A zone can be switched from one to another without moving your files again.