Ask HN: Any users of SimpleCDN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any users of SimpleCDN?

13 pointsthorax8 comments

They seem a little on the cheap cost side-- has anyone here used them? If you know your content is going to be seen by lots and lots of users (controlled by your own rotation), then this seems very low pricing.

http://www.simplecdn.com

For one of our coming projects, I've been reviewing Akamai, etc., and stumbled upon these guys. I'd love to know if someone else had tried them and could give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

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Did you check http://cachefly.com/ too? I'm also shopping for a cheap CDN and this an alternative I know.

Yeah, they're on our review lists, too.

The cool (insane?) part about simplecdn is that they only charge on upload, not on bandwidth usage.

Not sure how they manage that, but it appears like it would turn out to give us all sorts of savings.

When we evaluated cachefly last year, setting headers was not possible -- the files were just served with etags and whatever defaults cachefly servers had. You also had to upload files manually, no pulling files from origin servers automatically.

No custom headers was an absolute deal-breaker for static images, css, js. If you can't set an expires header, you've probably undone most of the good of distributing the content around the globe anyway.

I haven't used them, but be careful of their offer. If you look at their pricing, the $1 is for one credit, and they charge you a certain number of credits based on the size of your file. Here's the catch: it could get very expensive for you if you have a site that is long-tail with lots of files, but on average few views per file. If you have a few files that need to be served, or a few popular ones, it's probably a good deal depending on the quality of bandwidth you need. However, CDNs are a good example of you get what you pay for. If you need Grade A bandwidth and a CDN with a ton of POPs (e.g. for video), my bet is that they won't hold up since it looks like they are more budget and new at the game.

http://www.velocix.com/compare.php -- I saw these guys come across my feeds earlier in the week. They're a CDN offering up to 500gb (per mo?) of caching on their edge network for free.

I have no clue as to the size of their map, or quality of service, but since it's free it may be an attractive option for bootstrapped startups who don't want to pay the traditional monthly commits of Akamai, L3, LL, etc.

I saw a note at the bottom that says the free stuff is in private beta. Has that changed?

Haven't tried simplecdn. This pricing seems at first glance to be too clever, but if they can do it, it's certainly less than any competitor I've seen.

We use Panther Express (http://pantherexpress.com). More expensive, but not nearly as much as Akamai and other big guys. No commits. Fantastic network.

We're using simplecdn to distribute 20 training videos on out site in HD... so far so good, no complaints, videos are real long which is why we went with them.

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