Comments on: Using Amazon S3 as a CDN?

By: maxkir

maxkir — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:45:37 +0000

Hello David,

I've just started looking into CDN solutions and your post is really useful. Thanks a lot for the analysis and for sharing it with us.

Regards,
KIR

By: tekgems

tekgems — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:32:29 +0000

I would add Wuala as a potential CDN. I haven't measured ping response times, but it is free. You upload your file via wuala and you can hot link to it via HTTP or HTTPS. The service is inexpensive cloud CDN.

By: David Cancel

David Cancel — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:12:59 +0000

The origin server was running on Amazon's EC2 service.

By: quelish

quelish — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:20:04 +0000

What were you using as an origin server for these tests? That's not clear from your post.

By: Stu Thompson

Stu Thompson — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 02:09:03 +0000

Interesting read, thanks for the analysis.

I've just about concluded a two month beta period using a) EC2 to host my streaming media/podcasting application, and b) S3 as a CDN for 80% of my static traffic. While I love the prices and flexibility, EC2 instance bandwidth caps and, more importantly, the too frequent per connection bandwidth performance limits and problems are discouraging. We are based in Switzerland, which probably has a lot to do with the performance issues, but not even the EU-based buckets provided a manageable improvement.

So...AWS is only suitable for my price sensitive customers.

Time to try someone else. I think I'll have a look at CacheFly.

Thanks again for the post!

Stu

PS: My own efforts have kindled the blogging itch. Maybe I'll be able to post my own metrics in the next week or so.

By: Walter

Walter — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:47:57 +0000

Nginx's creator has said that serving static files from disk is usually significantly faster than serving data from memcached. That's because the files aren't really served from disk, they're served directly from Linux's speedy file cache, at least if you're serving a small enough set of content to fit in Linux's cache. So if you only have, say, <100 MB of static content that you'll be serving up on a regular basis, files will beat memcached.

By: teh

teh — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:07:12 +0000

correction: If you have to store and eventually serve thousands of gigabytes. Maybe S3 will be cheapest in that scenario.

By: teh

teh — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:52:22 +0000

Price is also a big deal breaker/maker. If you have to serve hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes, which of the above mentioned you think will bring peace and balance?

By: David Cancel

David Cancel — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:42:45 +0000

Jon, would love access to the Velocix beta. My email is dcancel ~at~ dcancel dot com.

Thanks,
David

By: Jon Alexander

Jon Alexander — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:38:47 +0000

You should try using Velocix.

We've just announced a free service, http://www.velocix.com/accelerator/, that should do exactly what you want. Let me know if you want to get access to the service (we're still in closed beta).