Get started with Dynamic Site Accelerator, a delivery product that improves your end user’s experience across your website and mobile apps.

Before you begin

You or someone with access to your domain name server (DNS) needs to add or update your DNS record at points throughout this process. Updating your DNS record lets us validate you own your domain when setting up edge certificates.

📘

About your DNS TTL setting

Consider setting your DNS TTL (time to live) for your existing hostname to 5 minutes (300 seconds) for now. It lets you Go live faster at the end of the process.

These instructions cover Dynamic Site Accelerator settings, edge certificates, and activating the settings on our network. For most options in this workflow, we’re asking you to accept the defaults as they appear on screen. We chose these defaults so you have the fastest, easiest time setting up your ​Akamai​ service with the least impact to your site. You’ll be able to fine-tune your selections later.

How to

1. From Control Center's home page, click Get Started. The homepage card opens to show products available on your contract.

2. Select Dynamic Site Accelerator. The setup wizard opens.

3. Enter the hostnames for your site or app, and press Enter.

   📘

   Number of hostnames

   You can enter up to 100 hostnames. Once you enter your hostnames, we'll analyze them and customize the rest of your steps based on what we learn. We'll show you that information shortly after we check your hostnames.

4. Click Next.

5. If you see the message that only one hostname can be used as the origin hostname, click I want to continue, or remove the hostnames that do not have the same origin.

6. Click Next.

7. Tell us about your Origin server and validate your origin hostname. Is your origin server hosted in Google Cloud Storage or AWS S3? See more information about cloud provider options for this step, then continue to Edge certificate.

   1. For Origin type, select Private server.

   2. Enter your server's hostname, and press Enter. We’ll generate an origin hostname for you. If you want, you can change it to something else.

   3. Click Validate.

   4. If validation succeeds, click Continue. If validation fails, resolve the error and validate again.

8. The process of adding a hostname to a certificate varies depending on the availability of certificates in your environment. The getting started process will walk you through the options available to you. For more information, see Edge certificates.

9. Choose which file extensions to cache. We prepopulated many common extensions for you.

10. Click Next.

11. Configure your Dynamic Site Accelerator settings.

    1. Add the path to your SureRoute test object.

    2. Click Next to accept the mPulse and Adaptive Acceleration default settings.

12. Review your settings and resolve any errors. You won't be able to make any changes in this setup once you activate.

13. Click Activate.

    📘

    Settings vs. traffic

    While your settings will be live after you activate, your traffic will not be live until you CNAME over to ​Akamai​.

14. Test your site and ensure everything is working as expected, then click Next to view instructions for Go live.

15. To go live and serve live traffic, copy the DNS records. Then follow the instructions set by your DNS provider to make updates in your DNS zone.

    📘

    Preset DNS TTL

    Your settings will take however long your DNS TTL is set to, to be live on the network. For your convenience we set this DNS TTL to 5 minutes (300 seconds) for you.

Next steps

Smoke test your site in production and ensure everything works as expected. Remove any temporary local hosts file entries you created while testing before you went live. When you feel comfortable that everything works, you can increase the DNS TTL to improve performance.