Acceleration regions
Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides three acceleration regions. Each accelerated domain name is assigned one acceleration region, which determines the CDN service scope of the domain name. To change the CDN service scope of an accelerated domain name, switch its acceleration region.
Select an acceleration region
Compare the acceleration regions in the following table and select the region that suits your business.
Region | How traffic is routed | ICP filing required |
Chinese Mainland Only | If you select Chinese Mainland Only, requests from users worldwide are routed to edge nodes in the Chinese mainland. Requests from users outside the Chinese mainland are routed to the point of presence (POP) operated by China Telecom in East China. | Yes. An ICP filing from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is required. For information about how to obtain an ICP filing for a domain name, seeLimits. |
Global | If you select Global, requests from users worldwide are optimally routed to the nearest edge nodes. | Yes. An ICP filing from the MIIT is required. For information about how to obtain an ICP filing for a domain name, seeLimits. |
Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland) | If you select Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland), requests from users worldwide are routed to edge nodes in Hong Kong (China), Macao (China), Taiwan (China), and other countries and regions. Requests from users in the Chinese mainland are routed to POPs in Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (China). | No. |
Impacts of changing the acceleration region
After you switch the acceleration region of a domain name in the Alibaba Cloud CDN console, the following impacts occur:
Increased back-to-origin traffic: For example, after you switch the acceleration region from Chinese Mainland Only to Global or Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland), nodes outside the Chinese mainland are added. These new nodes do not cache resources from the origin server, so requests that reach them can be served only through origin fetch. This temporarily increases back-to-origin traffic. The secondary nodes of Alibaba Cloud CDN significantly reduce back-to-origin traffic. However, to avoid overloading the origin server, continue to monitor its load after the switch.
Reduced cache hit ratio: The increase in back-to-origin traffic from the new nodes temporarily lowers the overall cache hit ratio.
Change the acceleration region
To switch the acceleration region to Chinese Mainland Only or Global, make sure that your domain name has a valid ICP filing.
When the acceleration region is set to Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland), clients cannot access POPs in the Chinese mainland. Before you switch from another acceleration region to Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland), make sure that no traffic originates from the Chinese mainland (pay particular attention to the effects of local DNS caches). After you change the acceleration region, clear your local DNS cache.
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Log on to the CDN console.
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In the left navigation pane, click Domain Names.
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On the Domain Names page, find the target domain name and click Manage in the Actions column.
In the Basic Information section, click Modify.
In the Region dialog box, select the acceleration region to which you want to switch.
Click OK.