Plans
The minimum plan for these services is 100GB. To allow smaller services could lead to a waste of limited IPv4 resources. Pay-As-You-Go is not available for Multihomed services.
It is possible to change plans and Add & Remove PoPs after purchase. Removing a PoP does not refund any funds, Adding a PoP will cost you the difference between plans without regard to remaining time. These actions can be found on the dashboard and do not require staff handling.
HTTP Edge Caching
Nothing special is required to enable Edge caching, all cache zones will be maintained for each PoP. Just enable caching for the appropriate paths from the Zones link in the Dashboard. This can be used to produce a localized low latency cache for static resources.
Domain Setup
After purchase you will get a CNAME alias which will use Geolocation (closest first) to combine the multiple IPs you have been given. This alias is your service, this is what you need to point your domain or connecting users at. To do this you have many options:
Our DNS System
Add your domain to our DNS system, you can just add the records and select the X4B service to link them to. This system will take care of setting up the appropriate records for you.
An external DNS provider
If you wish to use an external DNS provider you will need to ensure that they support adding a CNAME as the root record (if you are only protecting a sub-domain such as play.* then you can ignore this section). Hurricane Electric (https://dns.he.net/) provide a free hosted DNS service that supports this.
It is possible to work around lack of CNAME for root record support at your provider by adding all the supplied IPs in round robin as root records. In this case your root record will be without geolocation and monitoring. However most modern browsers will implement their own fallover procedures with multiple records. You should ensure that this root record redirects to www.* as soon as possible to take advantage of the Geolocation.
Tunnels
You will need to configure a separate tunnel for each PoP, these can all go back to the same backend or multiple. It is important on your end if you are using GRE/IPIP tunnels that you listen to the multiple endpoint (10.0..) IPs you are given. This can usually be achieved by listening on 0.0.0.0
Monitoring
All Multihomed servers are monitored by atleast 10 individual locations at any time. We use these monitors to remove problem nodes from the IPs from the DNS CNAME we provide. We try and remove IPs as soon as we detect the even a slight latency increase to deliver the smoothest and least interrupted service possible. IPs will also be removed if you exceed your protection threshold in a location and the IP is nullrouted.
The status of all PoPs is reported in the dashboard.
