How to make your own branded Domain Name for your Amazon Cloudfront CDN service

by | Feb 22, 2017 | Blog

test-your-custom-branded-cdn

Six quick steps to branding your CDN distribution

When you are looking to take your website performance to the next level with using caching and a CDN, you may run into the case where you as assigned a rather generic CDN domain URL.

If you are still looking to setup your WordPress website to use caching and a CDN service you can take a look at this guide on setting up your WordPress site with WP Fastest Cache and Amazon Cloudfront CDN.

The good news is that you don’t need to actually implement the assigned URL. With a few quick steps you can custom brand that new CDN domain URL to match the rest of you business, project or application by making a very simple record entry to your DNS settings.

The process makes use of a CNAME record, otherwise known as a Canonical name that maps an alias or alternate name to a true canonical domain name, which will be your new generated CDN domain.

Steps 

How to custom brand your generated CDN domain name

  1. Copy the generated CDN domain name assigned to you by AWS Cloudfront (or whichever CDN service you are using) when you create the distribution.
  2. Open your DNS editor – here in this guide we are using the Simple DNS Zone Editor from within cPanel. Select the website that will have the new CNAME record created for it.simple-dns-zone-editor-to-brand-your-cdn
  3. In the Name field – enter the text that will be pre-pended to your domain, in this example all that was typed in was “cdn” the domain service autofilled the “.adaptdesigns.net” part. This will serve as our new custom branded alias URL.
  4. In the CNAME field – paste or type your assigned CDN domain name, for this example we entered in the assigned Cloudfront domain name that points directly to our distribution.add-cname-record-in-your-dns-settings-for-cloudfront-domain
  5. Click to save or Add CNAME Record – give it a few minutes to propagate.
  6. Now test this adjustment – by going to your website, opening an image in a new tab, and replace the url to use your custom branded CDN URL as shown below in this animation.test-your-custom-branded-cdn

Congrats, you have now successfully mapped a custom alias URL to your own CDN distribution for making a nice, clean branded CDN URL. I hope this short guide helped you out.