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My company is using AWS CloudFront as a CDN for our website's media content. The previous employee set up a separate .com domain name with CNAME pointing to our cloudfront domain (d3cerlni7****.cloudfront.net)

Today we had a problem with .com domain, it was not responding and as the result all the images were not showing on our website. Cloudfront (d3cerlni7****.cloudfront.net) itself work just fine.

So my question is this: are there any benefits of using a .com domain to link to our CDN? Because it seems if the .com is down for some reason our content is not displayed. Wouldn't it be better to replace all the links to d3cerlni7****.cloudfront.net directly, instead of to a separate .com domain?

Thanks for help

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    First, why did your .com go down? If it was a CNAME record it should not have went down unless it was a DNS issue. My company created a CNAME images.company.com that goes to ourname.s3.amazonaws.com so we can have better control. What if we switch CDNs? What if AWS has an outage and we need to move it to MAXCDN? I just like to have control of the url.
    – Trey Copeland
    Jan 7, 2015 at 21:04
  • I see. Control makes sense. Thanks. It was DNS issue
    – OutFall
    Jan 7, 2015 at 22:32

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There are several advantages of using your own domain for a CDN:

  1. You have full control over it, and can switch CDN providers more easily while retaining the same URLs.

  2. The domain can contain keywords relevant to your site. For example if you sell widgets then widgetimages.com is a good domain to use.

  3. If you use a subdomain, the images are now related to your main domain in search engines' eyes. (This works best if the main site uses the www subdomain only, otherwise cookies set on example.com are also sent to img.example.com on every request.)

  4. If you decide to change the domain/subdomain you use for some reason, you have full control over 301 redirects which you do not have with a *.cloudfront.com address.

If you regularly have DNS issues with your domain, I'd suggest finding a more reliable domain registrar!

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  • Registars don't always host DNS records for their domain names. If @N0ir's team is having issues with DNS, they should find another DNS host (Such as Amazon Route 53, Microsoft Azure DNS, free Yandex DNS etc), but don't necessarily need to change their registar.
    – ᴍᴇʜᴏᴠ
    Dec 5, 2016 at 22:28

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