Features & Use Cases

Image Optimization

Render and compress modern image formats by serving images from the edge.

How it works:

• Optimize your user experience so that content gets delivered quickly and efficiently. Automatically control image sizes across all your sites with no CMS changes.
• Preconfigured with optimizations for over 45,000 mobile device profiles, so your team doesn’t need to spend resources on varying resolutions or manufacturers.

Examples:

• Auto convert every image to modern formats like WebP, MP4, and others
• Force JPEG files to use progressive downloading for a better experience regardless if the original file had that attribute when uploaded to CMS
• Control quality settings or toggle lossless/lossy modes on-demand

IP Restriction

Protect intellectual property and secure development environments with granular access control down to the IP address level.

How it works:

• Block specific IP addresses and ASNs
• Returns a 403 (Forbidden) error page to blocked IP addresses

Examples:

198.51.100.0/24		    Blocked
AS399358 	       		Blocked

Enterprise WAF rules for WordPress and Drupal

Added site integrity and security by inspecting each uncached request in detail.

How it works:

• Adequate security is always a layered approach. By adopting a WAF, protections at the edge will protect your entire portfolio of sites on Pantheon from very real attacks that are all too common nowadays on the web.
• A key benefit of getting a WAF through Pantheon instead of a general firewall are the protections we provide are tuned for WordPress and Drupal go beyond the standard OWASP Top-10 rules alone.

Protects against:

• SQLi (SQL Injection)
• CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery)
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting)
• Remote and Local File Inclusion (RFI, LFI)
• Remote Command Execution (RCE)
• Session Fixation

Rate Limiting

Protect websites from volumetric attacks and unwanted traffic patterns.

How it works:

• A custom configuration will be added to your site that checks the frequency of requests against originating request signatures
• If limits are exceeded, visitors using those signatures will be returned an error message.

Examples:

example.com/		Standard - 500 rps
example.com/contact-us 	       Strict - 100 rps

Custom Error & Maintenance Page Rules

Customize error pages.

How it works: The CDN intercepts traffic upon detecting specific server errors, timeouts, or a manually activated maintenance rule. Instead of showing a generic error, it immediately serves a custom-designed page directly from the edge.

Common Use Case: If your origin server becomes unresponsive, the CDN automatically displays a branded error page. This prevents users from seeing plain "502 Bad Gateway" errors and can direct them to a status page or support channels.

Geolocation & Geofencing Control

Brand and intellectual property protection with fast location-based edge logic.

How it works:

• Geo headers will appear instantly for each visitor and request.
• Our edge provides the geo data to PHP/CMS faster than 3rd-party plugins/libraries.
• Take action on the edge based on user locale (eg. blocking or redirecting based on country).

Example:

X-Geo-City: 			“San Francisco”
X-Geo-Region: 		    “CA”
X-Geo-Postal-Code:  	“94108”
X-Geo-Country: 		    “United States”
X-Geo-Country-Code: 	“US”
X-Geo-Latitude: 		“37.7926235914618”
X-Geo-Longitude: 		“-122.40625861349275”

Device Detection

Categorizes visitors based on User-Agents.

How it works: Every browser sends a User-Agent header with each request to identify itself and the device it's running on. The CDN then reads this information and categorizes the device.

Common Use Cases:

• Targeted Functionality: Display a "click-to-call" button only for mobile users or show complex interactive elements only to desktop users
• Web Analytics: Gain crucial insights into your audience by segmenting traffic and user behavior by device type

Domain Masking

Enable page-by-page migrations by reviewing, and routing each request uniquely at the edge.

How it works:

• Migrate & update your sites gracefully so that you can apply agile processes to your relaunch.
• Consolidate your individual websites under a single domain to potentially improve SEO.

Examples:

• example.com points to new site
• example.com/old-page points to an old site
• example.com/blog points to other CMS
• example.com/archive points to an old site

Redirects

Do even more with cookie-handling, URL rate-limiting, header modifications and query string sorting and filtering.

How it works:

A CDN redirect intercepts a user's request at the edge and checks it against your configured rules. If the request matches a rule, the CDN immediately sends a redirects you to the appropriate location.

Common Use Cases:

Implementing redirects at the Edge allows for less latency- redirects living at the edge are faster than living in the application.

CDN Log Streaming

Complete security visibility with end-to-end edge traffic logs.

How it works:

CDN log streaming captures request data from the Edge as it happens and sends it directly to a data analysis endpoint you own.

Common Use Cases:

Customers who want to monitor all Edge activity typically opt in to this- monitoring edge activity can aid in finding and acting on malicious activity.

Header Modification

Optimize your website by modifying headers to increase performance, security, and flexibility without altering your core application code.

How it works:

• Override global values to improve caching, add security headers, update request data, and control cookies at the edge.
• Customize visitor experience so your martech stack can leverage more user information.
• Centralize header modifications across your portfolio of sites for governance and saving time.

Examples:

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) header examples:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://example.com

Custom header and value example:

A-Custom-Header: “custom value”