Knowledge base

Putting a site behind a CDN

Whether you need to do anything at all depends on which product your site is on — on one of them the CDN is already there.

A CDN keeps a copy of your site in data centres around the world, so a visitor in Sydney is served from Sydney instead of waiting for Europe. What you have to do about it depends on which product the site is on.

Footprint-free sites: it is already on

Nothing to switch on and nothing to buy — the CDN is part of what that product is, and it is included. There is no provider name shown on the card, and that is deliberate rather than an omission: which edge account fronts which site is exactly the fact that product exists to keep private.

Mainstream hosting: off by default, and you choose

Open the site, then the CDN tab. Three options:

  • Off. The site is served from its origin. Fine for a site with visitors in one country.
  • Managed. We provision and run the edge for you. Pick it and it is live in a few minutes.
  • Your own account. Connect your own Cloudflare account and we configure the zone in it.
  • Your bill for the CDN stays with them; you keep full access to their dashboard.

You can also decide when you create the site: under CDN provider, choose No CDN (our nameservers only) and the site starts with the CDN off. Our nameservers still answer for your domain, so DNS works exactly as it does for any other site.

What the allowance means, and why Africa costs more

A managed plan comes with a traffic allowance in gigabytes. A gigabyte is not the same price everywhere — serving one to Africa or South America costs several times one served to Frankfurt — so the allowance is counted in base-region-equivalent gigabytes and traffic in dearer regions spends it faster.

That sounds like small print but it is the honest version: it means the number on your plan is the true worst case whatever mix of countries your visitors come from, rather than a headline figure that quietly does not apply to your audience.

Set a budget before you need one

The CDN tab has a budget. Set it. Traffic is the one cost on the platform that somebody else can move — a link that goes unexpectedly well is indistinguishable from a scraper — and a budget turns a surprise into an email.

Changing your mind

Switching tiers does not move your site or change its content; it changes where visitors are served from. Turning the CDN off leaves the site running from its origin.

Latest from the blog

What we have been writing about hosting, SEO and running sites at scale.

SEO and Link Building from the Hosting Layer: A 2026 Operator's View

How hosting shapes indexing and link equity in 2026: keeping pages indexed, vetting aged domains before you build on them, link building without a footprint, and an honest line on what infrastructure can and cannot do for SEO.

Read the post →

Making WordPress Fast and Secure: A Performance and Plugin Checklist

A practical checklist for fast, secure WordPress: server-level caching, a per-site object cache, the handful of plugins worth running, keeping the stack current, and the WooCommerce pages you must never cache.

Read the post →

How to Choose Managed Web Hosting in 2026: A Buyer's Guide

What actually separates good managed hosting from a cheap box with a control panel — migrations, backups, isolation, real caching and honest scaling — and how to judge it before you commit.

Read the post →

Read the blog →

Still stuck?

Support is included on every plan, the desk is open 24 hours a day, and you can write to us in any of our 58 languages — we answer you in yours.

Contact support → All articles →