Enabling Kapsule CDN on Your Site

Kapsule CDN caches your site at the edge so visitors anywhere in the world are served from a nearby location instead of your origin server, and turning it on is a single toggle on the site you want to accelerate.

There is no separate CDN product to buy: it comes with the hosting plan the site sits on. You turn it on from the site's own menu in KPanel, wait a few minutes for the edge certificate to issue, and your domain starts serving from our edge network. Two things have to be true first, and this guide covers both: the site needs a custom domain, and its plan needs to include the CDN.

What Kapsule CDN Does

When the CDN is on, requests for your domain reach our edge network first. Anything cacheable is answered from the closest of 119+ global locations. Anything that is not cacheable, or that has expired, is fetched from your origin and then held at the edge for the next visitor.

Which Plans Include the CDN

The CDN is a plan entitlement, so what your site gets depends on the plan that site is on. There are two levels, and the badge at the top of the CDN page tells you which one is active:

• Kapsule CDN covers global edge caching, the automatically issued edge SSL certificate, and cache purging.
• Kapsule CDN+ adds DDoS protection and smart edge routing on top of that, and carries a larger included bandwidth allowance.

You can compare and change plans at kpanel.kapsulehost.com/plans/hosting, or see Upgrading Your Plan.

Before You Start

The reason is technical rather than commercial: the edge has to issue an SSL certificate for the hostname it serves, and that requires a hostname whose DNS can be pointed at the edge. A shared Kapsule hostname is managed by us and cannot be repointed for you, so the certificate request would never complete and the site would look enabled while serving errors. We block it at the point of the click instead. See Adding a Custom Domain to Your Website for the connection steps.

Enabling the CDN Changes Your DNS

This is worth understanding before you click, because it surprises people.

Turning the CDN on does not leave your DNS alone. Your domain has to resolve to our edge network instead of straight to your origin, so enabling the CDN rewrites two records for the site:

• A CNAME on www pointing at the edge. Any existing A or AAAA record on www is removed first, because a CNAME cannot sit alongside them.
• An ALIAS on the bare domain pointing at the same edge, so traffic to your domain without the www also goes through the CDN. Any A or AAAA record at the bare domain is removed.

The site is only marked as CDN-enabled once the primary domain's DNS has actually been written and pointed at the edge. If that step does not succeed, the panel keeps showing the CDN as off rather than telling you it is on while your traffic still goes elsewhere.

How to Enable the CDN

1. Sign in to KPanel.
2. Click Websites in the left sidebar, then click the site you want to accelerate.
3. In the site's own menu, open Performance, then Kapsule CDN.
4. The page opens on the banner CDN is off for this site. Click Enable CDN.
5. A confirmation appears: "CDN provisioning queued. The edge cert can take up to 5 minutes."

The direct address is /websites/<site-id>/cdn.

What the Wait Looks Like

Nothing visible happens for the first few minutes, and that is expected rather than broken. Here is the sequence:

1. The DNS records described above are written for your domain.
2. Those records have to propagate before a certificate can be issued for the hostname. That is a DNS timing constraint, not a queue we can jump.
3. The edge requests the certificate. If DNS has not propagated yet, the request is left pending and retried automatically until it succeeds.
4. Once the certificate is issued, the site flips to CDN-enabled.

Once the certificate is issued, the banner changes to CDN is on with the note "CDN active. Your domain serves content from the edge", and the full set of control cards appears below it. HTTPS is forced on the hostname at that point.

Settings You Can Change

Cache TTLs

The Cache TTLs card holds two numbers, both in seconds, both defaulting to 3600 (one hour):

• Edge TTL (seconds): how long the edge holds a copy before going back to your origin.
• Browser TTL (seconds): how long a visitor's own browser keeps its copy.

Lower numbers mean fresher content and more requests to your origin. Higher numbers mean better performance and staler content until you purge. Changes save as you set them and are pushed to the edge straight away.

Image Optimisation

The Image optimisation card has two switches:

• On-the-fly image optimisation: resizes and compresses images on first request, then caches the optimised result at the edge.
• Serve WebP to supported browsers: delivers WebP to browsers that advertise support, and the original format to everything else.

Both are worth leaving on for almost every site. Turn image optimisation off only if you serve images that must arrive byte-identical to the original.

Watching Your Bandwidth

The This month's bandwidth card reads live from the edge and resets on the first of every month. It shows what you have used against the allowance included with your plan, with a bar that turns amber past 80 percent and red at 100 percent.

If the card reads "Usage unavailable", the live figure simply could not be fetched at that moment. It is a display problem, not a sign that the CDN is down. Reload the page in a minute.

Turning the CDN Off

1. Open Performance, then Kapsule CDN on the site.
2. Scroll to the Disable CDN card, which reads "Traffic goes back to your origin server."
3. Click Disable.

Traffic reverts to your origin immediately, and the edge zone for the site is removed so bandwidth stops accumulating. You can enable it again at any time, but the DNS records and the edge certificate have to be set up again, so allow another few minutes.

Troubleshooting

"Kapsule CDN needs a custom domain." The site is still on a shared Kapsule hostname. Connect your own domain, then enable the CDN on that domain. This is the single most common reason the toggle fails.

"Kapsule CDN is not included on your current plan." The plan attached to this site has no CDN entitlement. Orbit projects and Container Hosting plans are the usual cases. Move the site to one of the plans listed above and the toggle becomes available. See Upgrading Your Plan.

The banner still says the CDN is off after a minute. The DNS records have to propagate before the certificate can issue, which takes up to about five minutes. Wait, then reload.

It has been much longer than five minutes and the CDN is still off. The most likely cause is that your domain's DNS is not hosted with us, so the records could not be written automatically. Check where your nameservers point. If your domain is on Kapsule nameservers and it is still stuck, contact us.

My site went to the origin again after I edited DNS. Re-adding an A record on www or at the bare domain overrides the records that route traffic to the edge. Disable the CDN, sort out the DNS you need, then enable it again.

The CDN badge is showing but my changes are not. That is caching working as designed. Purge the URL you changed, or the whole site: see Purging the Kapsule CDN Cache.

The site did not get faster. The CDN accelerates delivery, not page generation. If your pages are slow to build on the origin, cache them for longer or fix the origin first. Improving Website Speed covers the origin side.

If the badge still has not appeared fifteen minutes after you enabled the CDN, email us at support@kapsulehost.com with the site's domain and we will look at the certificate issuance.