Do You Use a CDN to Hide Your Website’s IP Address?

Many people use proxy servers to hide their personal IPs when they are surfing the Internet. What some Internet surfers don’t’ realize is that websites can do the very same thing. There are a few websites out there that hide their website’s IP address using a CDN. If your site is one of the sites that hide your IP by using a CDN, you need to ask yourself one question – what happens if your CDN service experiences an outage?

Foregoing CDN Services

If you’re trying to hide your site’s IP for security reasons, there are other ways to protect yourself and your website. Using anti-DDoS services combined with website monitoring and a quality firewall is a better route to go. We don’t recommend using a CDN service for security purposes. Why? Because if you use a CDN service to hide your site’s IP, it is nearly impossible to be notified of website outages that occur due to an outage of your CDN in real time. It’s best to leave your IP address unhidden so you can utilize website monitoring services to manage your website uptime.

For Those Who Insist on Hiding a Site’s IP

For those of you who insist on hiding your site’s IP, there are a few things you’ll need to consider. First and foremost, make sure that you check your website’s CDN service regularly to ensure there isn’t an outage. If an outage occurs, disable the CDN service until your site is back up and running. This will allow website visitors to access your site when they type in the URL rather than having them go into a void because your CDN isn’t performing properly.

Ixam Hosting experienced this very issue recently, tweeting “Our CDN which hides our Website IP is having an outage. We have disabled it. Website is now temporarily accessible under the real IP.”

If, for some reason, you absolutely cannot allow the IP address of your website to remain unhidden and you must use a CDN, then make sure you take the appropriate steps and temporarily disable it if problems occur to ensure maximum website uptime.

At Alertra, however, we recommend keeping your IP address unhidden and that you utilize the tools mentioned above to manage the security and performance of your website. Transparency is often a good thing and not only does keeping your site’s IP unhidden help you provide that to your customer base, it also helps you better monitor the performance of your site and mitigate any potential website downtime.