[throwaway777555]

These are good points, but there are a few things to consider. First, as the article points out, self-hosting may result in a faster experience for your users due to the slowness of Google's font delivery. Secondly, your site is likely already serving up other assets which are not nearly as large as the fonts themselves (CSS, logos, other images, JavaScript, etc), so the savings is really not that large in comparison. Third, you can make use of cache-control headers that will ensure that all of these assets don't expire on the client's side for as long as you'd prefer.

One of the benefits of a CDN is the "N" part. If you host on a single server and you start getting requests from across the globe, those users will have a slightly more fluid experience if they can download the assets from a server that's physically closer to them than if they have to wait for packets to hop across dozens of nodes.