How-to · Intermediate · an hour
How to Connect a CDN
Everything you need to serve your assets from somewhere near your visitors, in the cases where that helps — the steps in order, the snag to watch, and the tip our support desk gives everybody.
Straight answer first
In a line: serve your assets from somewhere near your visitors, in the cases where that helps — a intermediate-level task that takes an hour.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Intermediate
Difficulty level
an hour
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
You do not need to be technical for this. The walkthrough is written for first-timers, tested on our own platform, and honest about which parts are genuinely fiddly and which are merely unfamiliar.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The route, start to finish
Here is the route in full: decide whether you need one, pick the style of integration, wire it up, never use flexible ssl and learn the new purge routine.
No stage needs code or a terminal unless the guide says so outright, and where it does, the exact commands are printed. The full step-by-step sits below; the sections around it give the context that makes it stick.
Read this before the first click
Flexible SSL on a proxy CDN. The padlock appears while the leg between the CDN and your server travels unencrypted — a false sense of security that strict mode exists precisely to replace.
It is worth learning because it is not some rare edge case — it is the single most common reason this task turns into a support ticket. Knowing it up front turns the whole job from risky into routine.
One habit that makes this easy for good
A CDN and LiteSpeed caching stack cleanly: the CDN serves static assets from the edge while the origin cache handles the HTML. Measure your real audience's latency before and after, and make the addition prove it earned the extra moving part.
Small habits like this are the real difference between people who find hosting easy and people who find it stressful. The tools are identical; the working method is not.
What you can skip on a Hosting Seller plan
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
And when a step misbehaves anyway, support answers at any hour with the actual fix, not a knowledge-base link and a shrug. Half our best guides began life as a pattern in the ticket queue.
Why the job is simpler on our plans
Tutorials age badly when they are written against imaginary hosting. These are written against ours: the same panel, the same installer and the same defaults you will meet.
Order an annual plan and the first year of your domain registration is on the house.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Scoped honestly
Serve your assets from somewhere near your visitors, in the cases where that helps is a intermediate-level task — this guide budgets an hour and says which steps the platform absorbs.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Decide whether you need one
A local audience on fast hosting gains very little. A globally spread audience gains real latency cuts. The CDN question is a geography question before it is a technical one.
- 2
Pick the style of integration
Proxy CDNs of the Cloudflare kind take over DNS and filter everything. Pull-zone CDNs only rewrite asset addresses. The first adds security layers, the second adds simplicity.
- 3
Wire it up
Proxy: move the nameservers and set SSL mode to full or strict. Pull zone: the cache plugin rewrites asset addresses to the CDN hostname and that is the job done.
- 4
Never use flexible SSL
A proxy CDN offering 'flexible' SSL encrypts only the front half of the journey. Full or strict, end to end, is the only mode worth running on a live site.
- 5
Learn the new purge routine
Response headers show CDN hits, and purge paths now matter too. A CDN adds one more cache layer to clear whenever you publish a change.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- LiteSpeed caching running at the server, not bolted on by plugin
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is a CDN worth it for a small site?
Often not. A UK audience on good European hosting sees marginal gains. CDNs earn their keep with geographically spread visitors, heavy static assets, or the security layers bundled alongside them. Measure first, then follow the numbers.
My changes stopped appearing after I added the CDN.
There is one more cache in the chain now. Purge the CDN as well as the origin cache after an update. Most integrations link the two purges; until that is set up, the CDN faithfully keeps serving what it cached before your edit.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
Read next
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Give your website a proper home.
Free SSL, a free move in, renewals charged at the order price, and human support around the clock. That is the whole offer.
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