[auntjemima]

SimpleCDN looks like it's already done something like this ("easy API, democratizing the CDN").

While I'm not a customer of either SimpleCDN or CloudFront yet, this looks easy enough to deal with:

    http://www.simplecdn.com/solutions#UploadBuckets

It's also MUCH cheaper than CloudFront:

    http://www.simplecdn.com/pricing

Also from that page: "There are no contracts or monthly minimum fees, etc."

It looks like they don't have nearly the reach that something like Akamai or Limelight has (but comparable to CloudFront currently):

    http://www.simplecdn.com/noc

For a small to medium sized project, this is what I would personally sign up for rather than CloudFront.

[jasonkester]

Are you sure you're reading the right pricing chart? Comparing these:

http://www.simplecdn.com/pricing http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

storage: Amazon: $0.15/GB, simpleCDN $5.00/GB (ouch!)

transfer out: Amazon: $0.17-$0.22/GB, simpleCDN $0.09/GB

transfer in: Amazon: something, simpleCDN: nothing

requests: Both: $0.01/10k requests

So yeah, you might save a few pennies on bandwidth, but SimpleCDN would kill you on storage it seems.

They do seem to offer another product that they call "SimpleCDN S3+", that I assume is their equivilant of S3, since the prices are about the same. Is that what you were comparing?

[thorax]

We trialed SimpleCDN in some simple cases for files I've had on it, and the performance was pretty bad as measured by Pingdom across the world. I love the idea and wanted them to be good, but it simply couldn't perform for us and always seemed to be serving from some place in the central U.S.

Maybe they've gotten better in the past few months, but they didn't do much for us except for give us a reliable alternative hosting location. The performance never seemed to improve worldwide-- almost as if they don't have many edge servers.

[vaksel]

the difference is that cloudfront is backed by Amazon. So this means 2 things: a) it won't be going out of business any time soon b) if AWS goes down, usually so will the main amazon site. So you'll have hundreds of techies working to fix your issue.

Its mostly a trust issue...everyone heard of akamai, everyone heard of limelight, everyone heard of AWS.

[auntjemima]

AWS is a separate wing from the Amazon site, they buy their own servers and datacenters. There have already been numerous S3 and EC2 outages.

You won't get any support at AWS unless you pay for a premium contract. And, unlike SimpleCDN, there is no SLA with CloudFront yet.

While everyone has indeed heard of AWS, they are not in the same category yet with Akamai and Limelight just because they released a CDN product.

In each case, for the sake of a discount solution, you are probably sacrificing reliability, bulletproof contracts/SLAs, and a TON of presence locations vs. something like Akamai.

I like my brands just as much as anyone, but I think you're taking just as much chances with SimpleCDN vs. CloudFront. And with SimpleCDN you get better prices and an SLA that offers refunds for outages (which is better than nothing).