Quickstart
Set up your first service within minutes
Setup your account and first service
Varnish CDN is designed to make it easy to deploy your content into a global CDN. Our platform handles the complexities of caching and global distribution, allowing you to focus on your application logic. Whether you are running a high-traffic e-commerce site or a media-rich blog, our setup process ensures you can start serving traffic securely and efficiently without a steep learning curve.
Create your free account on varnish-cdn
Getting started is risk-free with our Free Plan. We prioritize security and user experience, which is why we utilize passwordless login.
Simply enter your email address, and we will send you a secure "Magic Link" to sign in, no cumbersome passwords to remember. Once logged in, we highly recommend navigating to your account settings to enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for an added layer of security.
Create your first service
Once logged in, click the Create Service button. You will be guided through a streamlined configuration form where you only need to answer a few questions:
- Domain name: The public web adress your visitors will use. The service will default to this as the service name, but can easily be changed afterwards.
- Hostname and Port: The address of your backend server (where your content currently lives), this is where the CDN pulls the content from.
Then there is optional setting to automatically retrieve free TLS certificates for your domain through Lets Encrypt.
The system will automatically generate the optimal configuration based on your inputs.
Setup DNS records
To direct traffic through the CDN, you need to update your DNS settings. Navigate to the Service Configuration tab in your service dashboard.
For each domain you want accessed via the CDN, a new record row will appear in the table. Click on a domain to expand the details. You will see the specific CNAME or A record values you need to provide to your DNS provider (e.g., GoDaddy, AWS Route53, Namecheap).
Verify your settings
When all DNS records show a Green status in the console for your service, your content is now being served through the CDN.
To verify that your content is behind the CDN, you can look at the analytics graphs on your service start page, or check via the command line:
dig CNAME www.example.com @8.8.8.8
The answer section from the result should look something like this
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.example.com 3600 IN CNAME <your-varnish-cdn-url>.
Where <your-varnish-cdn-url> is the temporary domain that was generated for your service.