What are your experiences with CDNs regarding ease of development, support, performance, pricing, etc?
I am planning to use it to host a big number of images.
+1
A:
I'll comment on the only one I've experience of, Amazon's Cloudfront.
Firstly, the pricing model is pay-as-you-go, so you only pay for what you use. Great for your early startup or small product with anticipated growth. No setup costs.
Ease of use? Command line tools and various 3rd party GUI tools (some free - s3cmd, S3Fox and Cloudberry Explorer) to quickly upload files and folders to an S3 bucket for distribution.
Locations: not as comprehensive as CDNs like Akamai, but in the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan (and multiple locations within.)
Speed: Again I've little to compare to, but you can test it quite easily yourself.
Key drawbacks?
No SSL support (use vanilla S3, much slower) Can't compress assets on the fly (irrelevant for images). Gzip before uploading.
David Caunt
2009-10-15 20:13:46
i've heard in a few places that cloudfront has pretty poor response times compared to companies like Akamai and Limelight
seengee
2009-10-15 22:30:57
+1
A:
I have been using Cloud Files which is by Rack Space and it's working great and pretty damn cheap. Simple to use API helps if you have users uploading files to your app.
They have Pay As You Go as well and unlimited files starts at $.15 a gig
Slee
2009-10-15 20:15:49
I couldn't find out were are their data centers. That is very important for a CDN
Julien
2009-10-15 20:34:17
they actually use servers powered by the Limelight Network who also don't give out specific locations but this is a general map. http://www.limelightnetworks.com/network-delivery/
Slee
2009-10-15 21:27:01