You use this content panel to create your property hostname associations. These associations play a key role in getting your site or application out to ​Akamai​ edge servers, for access to requests from your end users.

Understand the property hostname association

Essentially, you use the hostname for your site or app to create an "edge hostname" that's used to get your Ion property to determine how to deliver your site or app.

• The hostname. During the property hostname process, you include this to verify that a request belongs to you as our customer, as well as determine which Property Manager configuration ("property") to use for delivery settings. This is typically the full hostname or domain name that end users target to access your site or app, without the https://. For example, www.mysite.com, m-mysite.com, travel.app.com, and my.travel.app.com are examples of hostnames you could use. This is also referred to as the "vanity hostname."

• The edge hostname. Property Manager automatically creates an edge hostname, using the hostname you provide. An edge hostname uses the "​Akamai​ Intelligent Platform" to map requests for your site or application to ​Akamai​ edge servers. For example, if you provided the hostname www.mymedia.com for your site, Property Manager creates the edge hostname, www.mymedia.com.akamaized.net.

Later, when you're ready to go live, you change the DNS record for your hostname to "CNAME" to the edge hostname to acknowledge this association. End-user requests to your hostname are redirected to the edge hostname. These resolve to ​Akamai​ edge servers that read from your Ion property to determine how to deliver your site or application. The actual delivery is based on rules and behaviors you establish in your Ion property.

Edge hostnames work behind the scenes and are not visible in the URLs of content served to end users.

Your content is cached on edge servers

This is one of the primary benefits of the ​Akamai​ network. You can set various caching rules and behaviors in your Ion property. Some are automatically applied as best practices and some are recommended. When a request for your site or app goes through your edge hostname, it's processed by your property. Your resources are accessed and held in cache on the ​Akamai​ edge network, based on how you apply these settings. This reduces the need to access your origin. It also speeds up delivery to other customers, that also make requests to the same edge hostname.

We'll discuss caching in more detail when you define property configuration settings.

Set up secure authentication

If you haven't already, you need to get a certificate if you want to deliver your site or app via HTTPS.

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Consider using mTLS

To offer more security for this connection, consider setting up your authentication using mutual transport layer security (mTLS). It requires that both the client and edge network server authenticate using a secure certificate. See its tutorial for complete details.

Set up a secure property hostname

You use Property Manager for this, and the process is predominantly the same regardless of product. To maintain consistent instructions, it's covered in the Property Manager documentation.

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Non secure property hostnames

As a best practice and to meet industry standards, you should use secure authentication. But, Property Manager also offers multiple ways to create non-secure (HTTP) property hostnames, too.