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by anderspetersson 4603 days ago
I made the switch from Rackspace Cloudfiles + CDN to Amazon S3 + Cloudfront a couple months ago. I was regularly getting emails about my app erroring when someone uploaded a file via my app to Rackspace, since Rackspace was down (or responding slowly).

Now I'm happy with Amazon S3 + Cloudfront, it's cheaper and more stable.
1 comments
typerandom 4603 days ago
I wish we could use CloudFront. Unfortunately they charge a bit for custom SSL ($600/zone/mo). Not that fun for a startup. Are you also using that? /R
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babuskov 4603 days ago
I don't understand this. You have so much traffic that you need CloudFront, but cannot earn enough to spare $600/mo? What kind of startup is it?

From what I could tell talking with some people so far, is that they only think they need CDN, while a couple of regular dedicated servers would be just fine. But, then again, most of my customers are in Europe so I can serve files cheaply. In US, I'm currently using FDCServers, which are 3.3x more expensive than equivallent Hetzner server. And this was one of the cheapest I found. I find most Amazon services to be overpriced. IMHO, you're just paying more for the brand name.

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timothy89 4603 days ago
The reason we're using a CDN is not because of the traffic - that would be easily solved with an AWS server and a lightweight http server such as nginx. We decided to go with a CDN because of two reasons:

1) The website and web app should load fast all over the world. Not only in the US or Sweden (where we live).

2) We don't want to host or put any time into hosting or own website and static files. We rather pay a little extra to don't have to think of that ever again ;)

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jsolson 4603 days ago
Well, ok... spin up a few static web servers in cloud zones all over the world and run squid (caching web proxy) on them backed by an S3 bucket.
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tlarkworthy 4603 days ago
1. premature optimization 2. you don't need a CDN to host stuff virtually (AWS, GAE, rackspace, Azure, linode etc.).
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typerandom 4603 days ago
Premature optimization or not. We care about the experience and want it to be as good as possible. /R
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anderspetersson 4603 days ago
Negative, I don't use a custom SSL.
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