[babuskov]

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.

[timothy89]

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 ;)

[jsolson]

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.

[tlarkworthy]

1. premature optimization 2. you don't need a CDN to host stuff virtually (AWS, GAE, rackspace, Azure, linode etc.).

[typerandom]

Premature optimization or not. We care about the experience and want it to be as good as possible. /R