What are managed instances?
Managed instances are an easy way to integrate redirection.io in your website's infrastructure.
With managed instances, you don't need to install any software on your hosting infrastructure, as redirection.io takes care of everything for you.
A redirection.io managed instance is a redirection.io agent server hosted on the infrastructure provided by redirection.io. It is capable of handling redirects for your blank domains, and can also act as a reverse proxy for your websites, with all the redirection.io superpowers inside.
What is a reverse proxy?
A reverse proxy is a server that sits between your website and the internet. It receives all the requests that come to your website, and forwards them to your hosting infrastructure.
In the redirection.io reverse proxy, when a request matches a given trigger, the reverse proxy applies the corresponding action(s). For example, if you want to redirect requests made to a specific URL to another URL, you can define a trigger for this URL, and an action that performs the redirection.
If no action is found for a given request, the reverse proxy forwards the request to your hosting infrastructure and serves back the response to the user. In other words, the reverse proxy is a transparent layer of your hosting infrastructure.
What are the requirements?
To use managed instances, you just have to point your DNS to our servers (see the step-by-step guide in the "Add a domain to your project" page). We will then act as a reverse proxy, filtering requests and responses, and applying actions when given triggers are fulfilled.
In other words, you don't need to install any software on your hosting infrastructure.
What are the benefits of using managed instances?
The main benefit of using managed instances is that you don't need to install any software on your hosting infrastructure. This makes it much simpler to integrate redirection.io in your website, and reduces the risk of conflicts with your existing software.
Another benefit of using managed instances is that we take care of the SSL certificate for you. We offer a free SSL certificate for each domain (using Let's Encrypt), which is a great way to improve the SEO of your website.
Finally, managed instances are hosted on our infrastructure, which is very reliable and offers several points of presence across the globe. Each project is managed using dedicated and replicated nodes, which ensures an optimal performance and process/data isolation.
Is it reliable?
All the CDN infrastructure is built with redundancy, scalability and performance in mind. This means that single point of failures are avoided, and that the traffic is load-balanced across multiple datacenters, in several geographical locations.
We perform a constant monitoring of the platform in order to provide the best possible availability. While we cannot promise there will be no outage of the platform, we provide a 99.9% SLA to our paid customers (SLA stands for Service Level Agreement, which is a commitment to a certain level of service availability. This is important for businesses that rely on their website's availability to maintain customer satisfaction and revenue).
How does it perform?
While using managed instances can simplify the integration of redirection.io in your website's infrastructure, there are also some risks that you should be aware of.
By pointing the DNS of your website to our servers, you accept that all the traffic of your website will go through our infrastructure. While we take care to ensure that your traffic is always handled properly, there is always a risk of errors or downtime. We take all the measures to offer the best availability possible, but there are always risks a technical issue happens. However, as stated above, we offer redundancy and a constant global monitoring, to ensure that the solution is reliable and consistent.
The connectivity and capabilities of redirection managed instances CDN allow a huge traffic to go through the infrastructure. However, there are limits detailed in a specific part of our documentation. Also, in the default managed instances layout, IP addresses are shared across our customers. Should you need a dedicated IP address or routing infrastructure, please contact us to talk about your requirements.
What's next?
Ready to go on and install a redirection.io managed instance on your website? The next steps are:
- Create your redirection.io account, your organization and a project
- Attach your domain name to this project 🎉