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I'm new to CDNs. I have dynamically generated pages that have a 30 minute expiry on each URL, and I want these to be edge cached. Are there any CDNs that can just act as a proxy cache and when a user requests a page, the CDN cache it for the next user in the same region?

EDIT: The CDNs I've read about all seem to require you to have users request the resource from a url that points to their domain name (eg. E123456.cloudfront.net). This is fine for images and videos because the user doesn't actually see that in their address bar. Since I'm caching the html pages, the user needs to be able to request it from the normal location (eg. www.mydomain.com/page1). I'm wondering if there are CDNs that allow this.

EDIT: Can anyone give me some names of a few CDNs that don't require changing urls?

Kyle
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Unless I've entirely misread your question that's EXACTLY what a CDN does, actually very little other than that to be honest.

Chopper3
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  • Cool, I've never used one before, I've just seen the people using amazon aws, and it seems they have to specify an s3.aws url instead of things happening seamlessly. – Kyle May 11 '11 at 14:22
  • Not a problem, nobody's born knowing this stuff right :) It seems like you've got the right idea and are on the right track, come back to us as you need ok. – Chopper3 May 11 '11 at 14:23
  • @Chopper I'm looking at Amazon Cloudfront (http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/), and it seems that to get it to distribute from the edge cache, you need to use a special url you get from an api call (eg E123456.cloudfront.net). This wouldn't work for dynamically generated html since users would have to access it at www.mydomain.com/page, and couldn't access it at a cloudfront url. – Kyle May 11 '11 at 14:32
  • Very often CDN users have to 'tickle' their CDN to call down content into cache, not doing so can often mean content is de-cached before you want it to be. In fact there's quite an industry out there just to keep content inside CDN caches. Not a CF expert though sorry, in fact I build my own CDNs as part of my job so don't know CF at all sorry. – Chopper3 May 11 '11 at 14:35
  • @Chopper - So, other CDNs would not require that I use a different url for it to be edge cached? That's my main concern. – Kyle May 11 '11 at 14:39
  • Yeah, had to think about that for a second but yeah, that's the case, some let you have the same URL. – Chopper3 May 11 '11 at 14:42
  • @Chopper Cool, thanks. Know of any off the top of your head? – Kyle May 11 '11 at 14:44
  • Pretty sure Akamai and Limelight - apologise up front if I'm wrong though. – Chopper3 May 11 '11 at 15:17
  • Almost all CDN's will honor cache-control headers, but the question is apt as at least in my experience many times (most, for me) the underlying application does not set proper headers and needs to be overridden at the edge to be cached. – Jason Martin Jan 13 '17 at 17:22