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Can we deliver our assets using a subdomain of our own domain (like "cdn.example.com")?

Orly Bogler
Updated

The use of a personalized CNAME / subdomain is a feature available on the "Advanced" plan or above and requires a quick manual setup on our side.

Cloudinary can set up a private CDN distribution to deliver your assets, which will have a hostname of https://example-res.cloudinary.com(instead of the standard https://res.cloudinary.com) and this will support both HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

Delivery of your assets can also be supported using a CNAME record from your own subdomain (e.g.,  http://cdn.example.com) which will work for HTTP traffic without any additional setup or costs.

Cloudinary also supports the delivery of HTTPS traffic via your own subdomain and there are additional costs for this to cover the provisioning and management of the SSL certificates which are deployed to the CDN edge servers.

Please contact us via a support request if you would like to set up a private CDN distribution and/or a CNAME from your own subdomain.

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Comments

18 comments

Date Votes
  • Richard Latman

    It would be nice if you provided instructions on how to request this.

    1
  • Orly Bogler

    Hi Richard, 

    Thank you for your comment. 

    In order to commence the setup process, available for "Advanced' plans and above, proceed to the  Settings page and follow the link which will submit a support request to set up a CNAME for your account. 

    Please don't hesitate to turn to us for assistance. 

    Thanks

    0
  • Eric Chapman

    Isn't there some SEO issues caused by not having a CNAME? I'm trying to figure out if I should use the service or not.

    0
  • Tobias Marx

    Of course there is. It is not advisable to host your content on a third party domain.

     

    I do not understand why this is not part of any package - but only the advanced plan.

    2
  • Itai Lahan

    Delivering your images via a CDN using the CDN's domain is a very common practice today. Sift through a few popular websites and you'll notice that very few deliver the images from their own domain. Modern search engines correctly take that into account.

    1
  • igdb

    This is potentially a dealbreaker for us. I'm surprised this is how it works, I totally expected CNAMEs to be available for ALL paid plans.

    It keeps all requests tied to a single domains so that there are no questions about legitimacy.

    We have already had a user report that he sees no images on the site because the cloudinary domain has been blacklisted by their firewall company. Think about that, if any other customer of cloudinary was to upload an offensive or illegal image, an entire country could be blocked from viewing resources on our website. This is unacceptable and must be acknowledged and addressed by the cloudinary team.

    8
  • Seshan Bavan

    Hi Guys


    igdb has a valid point I think you need to make the custom CNAME option available for all paid plans. Because some places will block your domain name.

    Thanks

    3
  • Raphael Arias

    igdb +1

    1
  • yumyo

    could not agree more +1

    1
  • Estra SpA

    igdb +1

    0
  • Stephen Johnston

    The SEO impact of this should be minimal at least for Google. Google will see a subdomain, even of your primary domain, as "another site" anyway.

    0
  • Itay Taragano

    Hi all,

    My apologies for the response delay.

    Please note that the CNAME setup requires manual configuration process, and therefore is supported in our higher tiers only.

    In addition, we constantly work with 3rd party services to white-list our subdomain ("res.cloudinary.com").

    If you still have any issues, please always feel free to contact our support, and we'll be happy to help find a resolution through an alternative domain.

    -3
  • Marcus Williams

    Being able to use CNAME should be free, your packages are already overpriced compared to the competition and they also offer custom domain support for free, probably why I'm preparing to move away.

    1
  • Roee Ben Ari

    Hi Marcus, appreciate the feedback. Regarding CNAME, the considerations mentioned above by Itay still hold, we'll revisit and update when there's a change. Generally speaking, we aim to build the most comprehensive, advanced and scalable image & video management service. At the same time we want to keep the platform affordable and ultimately provide great value. We're happy to look at your usage and help wherever we can.

    0
  • Laura Perez Vera

    There is a way of getting some free trial on this? I would like to work with this and play and be sure if I really need this?

    0
  • Daniel Mendoza

    Hi Laura,

    This is a feature that's currently available only on Advanced plan and above. But I can let you know that none of the functionality will change if you server content from a CNAME or from https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudname/.... Is there something in particular that you were looking to measure/evaluate?

    2
  • Laura Perez Vera

    If I use CNAME,it is going to be shown like this:

    http://img.mycname.com/image/upload/
    or like this:

    https://mydomain-res.cloudinary.com?
    1
  • Raz Ziv
    Edited

    Hey Laura,

    If you choose to use your own CNAME for HTTP traffic only, then the `url` property of our API responses will use http://img.cname.com, while the `secure_url` will consist of https://mydomain-res.cloudinary.com

    With regard to the URLs in the Media Library, clicking the "Copy URL" button of any image will copy the HTTPS URL, which means https://mydomain-res.cloudinary.com. However, when you navigate to the "Edit" page of an image, you can also switch to HTTP URLs for http://img.cname.com

    With that being said, we also offer two more options of CNAME configurations. One is having mydomain-res.cloudinary.com used for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic, and the second is having your own custom domain img.cname.com for both as well.
    Nevertheless, the latter requires adding your hostname to a CDN SSL certificate, which comes with an additional charge.

    0

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