[currysausage]

I don't know about Cloudfront vs Rackspace+Akamai, however, based on some quick tests I did a year ago, I seem to recall that Rackspace+Akamai didn't deliver the same performance as professional Akamai services. In my experiments, Rackspace+Akamai used different servers, often located farther away, than big Akamai sites. (If anybody has background information about this, I would be very interested to hear.)

[noelwelsh]

Rackspace CDN says this:

"Rackspace uses 213 of Akamai's edge locations, selected especially for our customers' typical usage patterns, and designed to cover all major areas of the globe." http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/

Akamai has approximately 5 gazillion edge locations, so yes, it is a cut down version. It is still a lot more POPs than just about every other CDN, though this doesn't necessarily translate into performance.

[currysausage]

Ah, thank you. That info wasn't there when I conducted the tests: http://web.archive.org/web/20120915095343/http://www.rackspa...?

"though this doesn't necessarily translate into performance" - Yes, even when the files were already cached, I wasn't always satisfied with the performance.

A detail that bugged me, by the way, was the high number of CNAME requests, although this should at worst affect the first view.