[ilaksh]

But they are just using Amazon's Cloudfront. They aren't using SQS or anything.

What technology risk is there in setting up Varnish and nginx on Digital Ocean? Or better yet some kind of out-of-the-box open source CDN. You would save a lot more than $2-3k.

[ghshephard]

I'm referring to Digital Ocean's technology. AWS (and Media Temple) had it's teething pains as well in it's first 4-5 years. I remember some fairly broad outages with their back end storage - but they've mostly dealt with those, and, the risk has gone down.

Note - there is another option - Deploy on multiple Platforms and be smart with your DNS balancing (http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/) when serving content. Particularly now that Digital Ocean is in Singapore/Amsterdam/NewYork I can think of some useful things I could do with $10/month droplet (2 Terabytes of Transfer) $300/month, in theory, gets me 20 Terabytes in Asia, 20 Terabytes in Europe, 20 Terabytes in North America. Now, whether DO would shut me down if I actually started using that Transfer is another question altogether...

[ksec]

Last test i tested DNS balancing ( from DNSMadeEasy )sometimes doesn't work as well as you did imagined, at least compared to EdgeCast or MaxCDN. Although that is quite long ago.

Would love to see any recent input.

[toomuchtodo]

There is no such thing as an open source CDN; there is a free CDN called Coral Cache (http://www.coralcdn.org/). CDNs cost money because you're dragging content from an origin to edge locations all across the world, and keeping it hot for client requests.

You could simply serve the content out of nginx, but you wouldn't see the performance benefits of keeping your content closest to the end user.