Using a Reverse Proxy with HubSpot
CMS Hub
- Enterprise
Websites built on HubSpot's CMS automatically utilize our global CDN with hundreds of local points of presence. However, some customers may have an existing CDN or complex routing rules that are not possible to maintain using HubSpot's built-in CDN. For customers on our CMS Hub Enterprise plan, we offer the ability to configure a reverse proxy.
Note: This service is not provided by HubSpot's Support Team. Customers may purchase time with a Technical Consultant for support with implementing Reverse Proxy on HubSpot or use our community forums for peer-to-peer support.
A reverse proxy is a type of proxy server that grabs resources from one or more servers and then returns them to the client with the appearance of it coming from the proxy server itself. An example of this would be having an existing website such as www.example.com that is not hosted on the HubSpot CMS while also hosting a HubSpot managed blog at www.example.com/blog. The blog appears to be hosted from the same server as the website, however, in reality, it is coming from HubSpot's servers.
At this time, Cloudflare cannot be used. HubSpot uses Cloudflare as its CDN and Cloudflare does not currently support multiple CDN layers.
HubSpot’s built-in CDN and all other services have multiple instances with automatic failover and recovery. If you implement a reverse proxy, we highly recommend you use multiple instances with load balancing. If all requests are routed through a single proxy node, it’s possible that requests will trip rate limiting protocols and requests will be served 429
or 403
responses until an in-browser JS challenge is completed.
Using your own CDN or reverse proxy may open up more configuration options, but it also requires significant operational know-how and maintenance. Below is a list of some considerations before you choose this route.
Feature | HubSpot's CDN | Custom Solution |
---|---|---|
Bandwith | Included | Additional cost |
SSL | Included; Automatic setup | Additional cost; Manual setup |
Global CDN | Included | ? |
Automatic cache management | Included | No |
Anti-abuse protection | Included | Customer-owned |
24x7 monitoring | Included | Customer-owned |
Support | Included | Customer-owned |
IPv6 | Included | ? |
HTTP/2 | Included | ? |
Latency | Optimal | Additional network hop required |
Additionally, if you proxy a subpath of your site to HubSpot, your main sitemap.xml will not include HubSpot pages unless they are manually added.
Adding a custom reverse proxy means that users of your website will make a request to your service and then be proxied through to HubSpot’s CDN, introducing another network hop.
First, add your new domain to your HubSpot account:
- Go to your domain settings for your portal.
- Click the Connect a domain button.
- Select Primary or Secondary. Note: Redirect and email sending domains are not supported.
- Click the Connect button.
- Choose the type of content this domain will be used for.
- Click the Next button.
- Select your brand domain if one has already been added in the portal and click "next", then enter your new domain. We'll refer to this domain as the "destination domain" from here on.
- Click the Next button.
- Click the Next button again.
- If this domain is hosted with GoDaddy, click "No, I'll set it up manually" when the GoDaddy connect modal appears.
- If this subdomain is currently hosted externally with a valid SSL certificate in place, there will be a box on the page under step 1 which says "It looks like this domain already has an SSL certificate from another provider. Click here if you would like to pre-provision SSL to ensure that there is no downtime before your new certificate is active". Click "Click here"; a modal will appear with values for a CNAME and a TXT record which are to be created on uniquely generated hostnames. These records are necessary for hostname validation, a process which allows HubSpot's CDN to serve content to incoming requests for a domain. Once they are created, click "Verify". If these records don't verify, come back in a few minutes and try again.(If this subdomain is not hosted externally with an SSL certificate, you will need to contact HubSpot support in order to get the values for these records).
- Click "Back to domains" in the bottom left hand corner of the page.
- Find your new domain in the list of domains and click the Edit menu for that domain.
- Check the Set as ready for publishing checkbox and click Save.
- Your domain is now ready for proxying.
Using your HubID from the steps above, your origin CNAME will be in the following form <HubId>.<Suffix>
. Your suffix is determined by the last two digits of your HubID.
HubIDs ending with | Suffix |
---|---|
00-10 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn00.net |
11-19 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn10.net |
20-29 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn20.net |
30-39 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn30.net |
40-49 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn40.net |
50-59 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn00.net |
60-69 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn10.net |
70-79 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn20.net |
80-89 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn30.net |
90-99 | sites-proxy.hscoscdn40.net |
For example, if your HubID is 123
, your correct origin CNAME would be 123.sites-proxy.hscoscdn20.net
.
Now configure your proxy to forward requests using your origin CNAME and add the following configurations:
- Set your proxy to perform no caching for paths originating from HubSpot. HubSpot automatically manages the content of our CDN’s cache so pages are updated automatically when content is published. Note: If the service caches responses, pages may not update for hours or days.
- Add or prepend to a
X-Forwarded-For
header with the client IP address of the original requestor. This is required to differentiate clients from each other. Many services such as CloudFront maintain these headers automatically. - To ensure personalized content based on location works, either pass a
X-HubSpot-Client-IP
header with a value of the end user’s IP (preferred) or pass a static header ofX-HubSpot-Trust-Forwarded-For: true
. The latter will trust theX-Forwarded-For
header, which may not have been updated by all upstream proxies. - Pass a
X-HS-Public-Host
header with a value of your destination domain. - Allow all HTTP methods.
- Ensure an SSL certificate is provisioned and installed for your proxy domain.
- Forward all query strings.
- Forward all other request and response headers as-is, including cookies.
- Ideally, all paths under your domain should proxy to HubSpot. If that’s not the case, then the paths
/_hcms/*, /hs/*, /hubfs/*
and/hs-fs/*
must proxy so assets load properly from your domain.
To confirm your configuration, visit:https://www.[yourdomain].com/_hcms/diagnostics
and then verify the following:
- The current time value changes on every load. This confirms that the page is not cached.
- The User-Agent is consistent with your browser.
- The Accept-Language value is consistent with your browser.
- The Cookie value is not blank.
- The Protocol is “https”.
- The leftmost IP address in
X-Forwarded-For
matches your IP address as reported by a service like https://www.whatismyip.com. - The IP-Determined Location values are accurate to your location. These are based on the IP-related headers, starting with
X-HubSpot-Client-IP
and ending inX-Forwarded-For
in descending order of precedence. IfX-HubSpot-Trust-Forwarded-For
is passed,True-Client-Ip
andX-Real-Ip
are ignored.
Publishing content with the HubSpot CMS should work just as if your domain was directly hosted by HubSpot. Features such as A/B tests and Content Membership that rely on cookies should work normally. When creating pages be sure to select your destination domain (if available) in the URL.