[saurik]

A lot of the price is bandwidth. They are effectively being reamed by using CloudFront instead of negotiating a better rate with a "real" CDN (which will also give then much better performance, as CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations).

(Although, actually, while I verified their total dollars spent is greater than what would be required to get a fundamentally better deal on bandwidth, I didn't take into consideration that once you slash their costs the amount they would be paying might no longer be ;P.)

[toomuchtodo]

> They are effectively being reamed by using CloudFront instead of negotiating a better rate with a "real" CDN (which will also give then much better performance, as CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations).

You can negotiate with AWS to get the same Cloudfront pricing as you would with Akamai. I know because I'm in the the process right now.

More importantly, they could be running on 2-3 dedicated servers at OVH or Hetzer, and have Cloudflare in front of them instead of Cloudfront. Or, if they insist on Cloudfront, switch to Price Class 100 (US and EU only). Its cheaper, and latency isn't that much higher vs serving out of all Cloudfront locations.

As long as most of your content is static, and you have a solid CDN, your origin doesn't have to be highly reliable or scalable. Its just an object store to persist data for the CDN.

[vacri]

CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations

This is nonsense. They have more edge locations than most. I didn't try all comparators in the list, but out of half of them I tried, none had more than Cloudfront: http://www.cdnplanet.com/compare/cloudfront/maxcdn/

So if Cloudfront has 'not many', who has 'many', and how many is that?

[saurik]

MaxCDN is a very low-end "CDN". If you can buy your account from the website without talking to an account manager, and the plans are as low as $9/month, you should not expect a lot of performance, features, locations, etc.: what you should, however, expect is "cheap"... MaxCDN is appropriately cheap.

To look at something more reasonable: CDNetworks is realistic competition; they are strong in Asia, and were the people I was comparing the pricing to (so they aren't going to be horribly expensive). According to the comparison website you are using, they have almost four times as many edge locations.

http://www.cdnplanet.com/compare/cloudfront/cdnetworks/

Honestly, though, the reality is that the really great CDNs don't even have data on this website (even for CDNetworks I think this data is not accurate: looks like an approximation): the leaders in this space are Akamai and Limelight, and both just show "Not Available" for the number of edge nodes they have.

Even going a little lower on the CDN pecking list, though: Level3, which according to this website you are using is mostly "competitive" with CloudFront (sometimes actually worse) in the regions CloudFront bothers to cover, is clearly covering entire subcontinents where CloudFront has nothing.

The reality is that CloudFront is still trying to grow out a network: they have poor coverage in Europe (which is pretty key), a few nodes in Japan/Singapore, and then next to no coverage anywhere else. Yet, they insist on pricing their product as if they were a big player (12c/GB is Akamai-level expensive).

(So, do I get to condescendingly say "this is nonsense" now? I mean, seriously: you clearly didn't spend much time using this website and you didn't look into who the leaders are to verify you weren't comparing low-end to low-end... also, I think you are not appreciating that 0->2 is infinitely better ;P.)

[vacri]

Well, like I said, I didn't check just one, but about half in the list - maxcdn was just in the link because you can't link that site to just one service. Akamai had nothing listed, and level3 and cdnetworks weren't in the ones I checked. From what I saw, they still have more than most.

I still think you're mischaracterising AWS as being a bit player - they have a decent presence with Cloudfront, it's just that there are a couple that are bigger. Like I originally said, 'more than most'. CDNetworks certainly does pound them in numbers, though.

[vertis]

Could probably fix some of this just by talking to Amazon about it. It's not like this is a 'for profit' setup.

[ksec]

Exactly, and if you include a little Powered by AWS CloudFront i am pretty sure they could drive down the price a lot. Or, they could start talking to Fastly, I am pretty sure they can work out a much better deal while being faster.

[lamontcg]

Amazon doing anything for free for the open source community would seriously shock me.

[soyverde]

They do spend a lot of time courting ruby/rails devs, though, so being able to say rubygems is hosted on AWS might be worth throwing them a significant discount.