Domains, Origin Servers, and Routing in Yottaa

To serve your website's pages and manage your traffic, Yottaa needs the following information about your site and how you want customer requests to be routed:

  • Your existing domain name.

  • Names or IP addresses of any resource domains your site uses.

  • Names of all origin servers a customer can access using your domain name.

  • Routing method Yottaa will use if you have more than one origin server.

The Domain & Origin Server page configures these settings. There are two main routing options, All Requests and Criteria Based.

All Requests

All Requests routes your traffic among multiple origin servers using one of these strategies:

Round Robin or Percentage. Round Robin evenly and randomly distributes traffic among several origin servers, for load balancing. Percentage lets you route requests randomly to different origin servers, by sending a specified percentage of traffic to each server. This is useful when you need to move traffic gradually from your old site to your new site starting with a small percentage, but you do not care which requests go to which site. This approach allows debugging of any problems that may arise on the new site. If you choose Percentage, the percentages must add up to 100%.

Criteria-Based or Split-Origin Routing

Critera-based routing, also called split-origin routing, allows you to route requests differently based on the contents of the request URL, client IP address, request header, or user agent. Customer Success helps you create an ordered list of conditions. Each condition can include one or more logical expressions. (In the platform, a condition is called a "rule set" and a logical expression is called a "rule".) Conditions can include regular expressions.

Matching Requests to Routing Conditions

Yottaa compares requests to one condition at a time, starting at the top of the list. To match a condition, the request must match all the logical expressions in that condition. If the request does not match the first condition, Yottaa compares it to the next condition, until there is a match. Yottaa then routes the request to the destination specified in that first matching condition.

Criteria-Based Use Cases

Parts of Your Site Are Hosted on Different Vendor Platforms

Some eCommerce companies host different pages of their site on different platforms. For example, you might host your e-commerce pages on Shopify, and your blog on WordPress, yet both are accessible from your top-level domain, www.yourdomain.com. You can create conditions based on partial URLs to correctly route these two kinds of requests to their respective vendor platform sites.

You Need to Transition from an Old Site to a New Site

If you change from one hosting platform to another, you need to gradually transition traffic from your old site to your new site. You can use criteria-based routing to send a small percentage of traffic to your new site. Using criteria-based routing to shift traffic allows you to route requests to the old or new site based on characteristics of the request, rather than simply assigning requests randomly to the old and new sites by percentages. This option allows you to gradually move selected traffic to the new site as you monitor its function and debug any issues that may arise.

Contact Yottaa Customer Success for assistance in setting up your split-origin routing rules and criteria.