Selectel CDN Setup: Static Caching, HTTPS & S3 Integration

After foreign CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly) blockages, static resource load times for users in Russia can increase to 1-2 seconds or more. Selectel CDN is a Russian CDN for websites with points of presence in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Amsterdam, optimized for projects with a predominantly Russian audience. Combined with Selectel Object Storage (S3-compatible), it reduces latency by 40-60% compared to foreign alternatives. We help configure the entire infrastructure: from creating a CDN resource to integrating with your project. Order a turnkey Selectel CDN setup — we guarantee faster loading for your Russian audience.

Why foreign CDNs are slow for Russia?

Foreign CDNs often use nodes in Europe or the US, giving Russian users from Siberia or the Far East an RTT of 150-300 ms. Selectel places caching nodes inside Russia, reducing response time to 10-30 ms. This directly impacts LCP and CLS — key Core Web Vitals metrics.

How to solve dynamic content caching?

The common practice is to cache only static content, but for frequently updated sites (news, blogs), fine-tuning is needed. We use edge_cache_settings and browser_cache_settings with different TTLs for different content types. Recommended values:

How we do it: stack and configuration

Connecting a CDN resource

In the Selectel panel → CDN → Create resource. Specify the origin server — your website or Object Storage bucket. Get a CNAME like resource-id.cdn.selectel.ru. Add a DNS record: cdn.example.ru → CNAME → resource-id.cdn.selectel.ru.

Or create via API:

curl -X POST \
    -H "X-Auth-Token: $SELECTEL_TOKEN" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{
        "name": "example-assets",
        "origin_protocol": "HTTPS",
        "origins": [{"source": "example.ru", "backup": false}],
        "options": {
            "edge_cache_settings": {"enabled": true, "value": "2592000"},
            "browser_cache_settings": {"enabled": true, "value": "31536000"},
            "gzip_on": {"enabled": true, "value": true},
            "force_https": {"enabled": true, "value": true}
        }
    }' \
    https://api.selectel.ru/cdn/resources/

aws s3 mb s3://example-assets \
    --endpoint-url https://s3.selcdn.ru

aws s3 sync ./public/assets s3://example-assets/assets/ \
    --endpoint-url https://s3.selcdn.ru \
    --cache-control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable" \
    --content-encoding gzip

Extended case: for an e‑commerce site with 10 million product images per month, we set up automatic preview upload via Laravel + Amazon S3 API (compatible). Average image load time dropped from 1.2 s to 0.15 s. During peak loads (Black Friday), the CDN handled 5000 RPS without a single failure.

Integration with Laravel (S3 + CDN)

// config/filesystems.php
'selectel' => [
    'driver'   => 's3',
    'key'      => env('SELECTEL_KEY'),
    'secret'   => env('SELECTEL_SECRET'),
    'region'   => 'ru-1',
    'bucket'   => env('SELECTEL_BUCKET'),
    'endpoint' => 'https://s3.selcdn.ru',
    'url'      => env('CDN_URL'),
    'use_path_style_endpoint' => false,
],

Storage::disk('selectel')->put(
    'images/' . $filename,
    $file->getContent(),
    [
        'visibility'   => 'public',
        'CacheControl' => 'public, max-age=31536000',
        'ContentType'  => $file->getMimeType(),
    ]
);

$publicUrl = Storage::disk('selectel')->url('images/' . $filename);
// https://cdn.example.ru/images/filename.webp

CDN provider comparison

Work process: from audit to deployment

1. Analytics — study content structure, current load metrics, server logs, identify problematic resources.
2. Design — select optimal TTLs, configure S3 + CDN connection, plan cache invalidation.
3. Implementation — create bucket, configure CDN resource, integrate with CMS (WordPress, Laravel, Drupal).
4. Testing — verify correct content delivery, HTTP headers, load speed via PageSpeed Insights.
5. Deployment and monitoring — redirect traffic to CDN, set up alerts for 4xx/5xx errors.

Setup timeline

From 1 to 3 working days depending on integration complexity. Time includes creating all resources, DNS setup, and test launch. Cost is calculated individually after audit — contact us and we will assess your project.

What's included in turnkey work

• Creating and configuring CDN resource (HTTPS, caching rules)
• Setting up Object Storage and integration with your project
• Documentation on access and support
• Training your team (cache invalidation, adding new buckets)
• Technical support during launch phase

Typical mistakes and how to avoid them

• N+1 requests to origin — if edge_cache_settings is not configured, every request hits the server, negating the CDN's benefit. Always set TTL at least 1 day for static content.
• Hotlinking — always enable Referer validation or use signed URLs. Otherwise, your traffic may be stolen.
• Incorrect cache invalidation — when updating files, change their names (versioning) or call the API to purge. Waiting 30 days for natural expiration is bad practice.

Contact us for a free consultation. Order a speed audit of your website — we will propose the optimal CDN configuration.

We regularly encounter a situation: "The site is not opening" at 3 a.m. — and it turns out that the VPS disk is full because nginx logs haven't been rotated for six months. Or the server went down under load on the day of an advertising campaign launch because the shared hosting had a limit of 50 concurrent connections. Setting up hosting and deployment is not about "where it's cheaper" but about what happens when something goes wrong. Our team helps avoid such incidents by designing infrastructure that accounts for real load patterns.

When to choose Vercel and Netlify?

Vercel is built for Next.js — deploy in one push, preview deployments for every PR, automatic CDN, Edge Functions, ISR without configuration. For frontend projects and JAMstack, it's the optimal choice: no operational overhead, time-to-deploy measured in minutes.

Real limitations: Vercel Serverless Functions run in us-east-1 by default (latency for Europe +80–100ms), Function timeout 300 seconds on Pro, Bandwidth 1TB/month on Pro. For heavy backend, you need workers or a separate server.

Netlify is closer to static sites and Edge Functions based on Deno Deploy. Build minutes are the main limitation on the free tier.

Why is Docker the foundation of predictable deployment?

"It works on my machine" — classic. Docker solves this through environment containerization. But a bad Dockerfile creates new problems.

A typical mistake: copying everything into the image without .dockerignore, resulting in an 800MB image instead of 80MB. node_modules inside the image weighs as much. Correct approach: multi-stage build.

FROM node:20-alpine AS builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci --only=production
COPY . .
RUN npm run build

FROM node:20-alpine AS runner
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /app/.next ./.next
COPY --from=builder /app/node_modules ./node_modules
COPY --from=builder /app/package.json ./package.json
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["npm", "start"]

Final image: 180MB instead of 1.2GB. CI build time is reduced due to layer caching — if package.json hasn't changed, the layer with npm ci is taken from cache.

Docker Compose for local development and simple production scenarios: application + PostgreSQL + Redis in one configuration. For production on a single server, it's a perfectly viable option if there's no requirement for horizontal scaling.

More about containerization — Wikipedia: Docker.

How to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy?

Nginx in front of the application is standard for VPS and dedicated servers. Main functions: SSL termination, gzip, static files, rate limiting, upstream load balancing.

A configuration often done incorrectly: worker_processes auto — number of processes equals CPU count. worker_connections 1024 — that's 1024 per worker process. With 4 CPUs and 1024 connections = 4096 concurrent connections. For a high-traffic site, you need worker_connections 4096 and set keepalive_timeout 65.

For static assets with hash in the filename:

location ~* \.(js|css|woff2|png|webp)$ {
    expires 1y;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, immutable";
}

immutable tells the browser: don't revalidate this file even on hard refresh. This only works correctly with content-hashed filenames (which Vite/webpack do by default). Documentation — Wikipedia: Nginx.

AWS: flexibility and complexity

EC2 + Auto Scaling Group — classic for horizontal scaling. AMI with pre-installed application, Launch Template, ASG with min/desired/max instances, Application Load Balancer. When CPU > 70% for 3 minutes — scale out, when CPU < 30% for 15 minutes — scale in. Health check via ALB removes unhealthy instances from rotation.

ECS Fargate — containers without managing EC2. Deploy a Docker image, specify CPU/memory (512 CPU units = 0.5 vCPU, from 512MB memory), Fargate launches it. More expensive than Lambda, but no cold start and no timeout limitations. Suitable for long-running processes, WebSocket servers, heavy workers.

RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ: automatic failover in 1–2 minutes when primary fails. Read Replicas for scaling reads. RDS Proxy for connection pooling — Lambda functions cannot hold long-term connections, the proxy buffers this.

Kubernetes: when it is justified

K8s adds significant operational complexity. Justified when: multiple teams deploy independent services, fine-grained resource allocation per service is needed, canary deployments and blue/green without downtime are required.

AWS EKS, GKE, or managed k8s from Hetzner (cheaper). Helm charts for standard services. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler based on CPU and custom metrics (RPS via Prometheus).

For most startups and medium-sized projects, Kubernetes is overkill. ECS or Fly.io provide 80% of the capabilities with 20% of the operational complexity.

Monitoring and alerting

A server without monitoring is waiting for an incident. Minimal stack: Prometheus + Grafana (or Grafana Cloud for managed), alerting on disk > 80%, memory > 85%, CPU > 90% over 5 minutes, error rate > 1%. Uptime via Better Uptime or Upptime (self-hosted).

Logs: Loki + Grafana or CloudWatch Logs Insights. Structured JSON logs (winston, pino) are mandatory — otherwise, log searching becomes a pain.

What is included in hosting setup

• Audit of current infrastructure and load profiling
• Selection of target architecture (VPS, AWS, serverless, Kubernetes)
• Setting up CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) with automatic deployment
• IaC via Terraform or Pulumi (infrastructure as code)
• Configuration of Nginx, SSL certificates, HTTP/2, brotli
• Monitoring and alerting (Prometheus + Grafana, PagerDuty)
• Documentation of runbooks and team training

Additionally, contact us if you need migration from current hosting or integration with external services.

Work process

1. Audit of current infrastructure (2–5 days)
2. Selection of target architecture with load and budget justification (1–3 days)
3. Setting up CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) (2–5 days)
4. IaC via Terraform or Pulumi (3–10 days)
5. Setting up monitoring and alerting (2–5 days)
6. Documentation of runbooks and team training (1–3 days)

Our experience — 7 years on the market, over 50 projects, guarantee of operability after deployment.

Timeline

• Basic deployment on VPS with Docker + Nginx + CI/CD: 1–2 weeks.
• Setting up AWS infrastructure with Auto Scaling, RDS, CDN: 3–6 weeks.
• Migration to EKS from scratch: 6–12 weeks.
• Setting up Vercel/Netlify for JAMstack: 3–5 days.

The cost is calculated individually depending on complexity and scope of work. Get a consultation — we'll evaluate your architecture in one day.