About the Surge CDN

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a system of distributed servers that delivers Web content to a visitor, based on an algorithm that takes their location into account.

Internally, Surge has an algorithm to routes requests to different edge nodes ensuring files are never moved twice. Each file has a unique signature called an ETag, and the moment a file is uploaded to Surge, we highly optimize the path all the way back to the browser.

We carefully thought through the various options available, and consiously decided to build our own CDN rather than use an existing provider’s.

As we continue to expand the Surge CDN, we will be adding more physical locations (POPs) and sharing more of those details—stay tuned by following us on Twitter or our blog.

Automatic caching strategy

Surge’s CDN also applies proper caching headers for you automatically. When you publish to Surge, a strategy we call Lucid Caching is automatically applied:

  1. Gzip is enabled for all appropriate content types
  2. Far-future expiry headers are properly set

Read more about using Surge’s automatic Lucid Caching. If you’re interested in specific customizations to the Surge CDN beyond this, let us know.