Origin shielding in CDN: How it protects your server?

How to make sure that your web-site will work smoothly during traffic spikes? One thing that protects your origin server from the flaw of requests and breakdowns is origin shielding. What is it, and how does it help?

What is CDN origin shielding?

This technology appeared recently. It redirects users’ requests from the origin server to some other points of presence and secondary PoPs that are used for failover situations. Origin shielding decreases the load from the origin server by redirecting requests from a special data center (it is also called “shield”) that is typically located near user’s origin server. This way several data-centers from the network do not need to request the same information from the origin server.

The main point of origin shielding is to make the user receive fewer requests for content from the content delivery network. Similar requests are duplicated, and content is delivered from CDN cache. As soon as origin shielding is activated, CDN will make a request for content from the origin server only in case if content has not been requested before. But even in this instance you will see that less bandwidth is used, and load on the server has decreased. In addition, origin shielding reduces expenses on origin egress.

How to activate the “Shield PoP”

Note that not all providers support the function of origin shielding. But if they do, you can customize and configure this option in admin panel within origin pull policy. Besides, there are different tools allowing testing performance from several PoPs working with the origin server. This function helps you to configure the best origin and the most effective PoP.  Usually CDN providers offer only one PoP which may be a shield of the network, but it is usually enough for providing protection.

If you want to learn more about CDN technologies and features, read this article: https://inxyhost.com/blog/cdn-terminology:-a-short-guide-for-the-starters