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Comment by shingen | Hacker News Reader

That's a solid article for anybody getting started with web development, but it really needs more coverage on the importance of CDNs for static content. Between Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, etc. they're cheap and trivially easy to utilize. They're now extremely accessible to less experienced developers and developers on a shoe string budget.

My business has content that users can freely embed on external sites; it's dynamic locally, but served up static (15 minute refreshes) off of Rackspace Cloud Files CDN for the embed. The cost to serve 1 billion widgets on AWS came out to $1,236 due to the transaction costs, but on Rackspace (which has compression with Akamai and no per transaction cost)it got down to $180, which is insanely cheap for serving a billion widgets.

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Thanks for the feedback and recommendation!

I agree with you on CDN's, I was in two minds which direction to take with the article as my original title was going to be along the lines of "... without spending any more money". I think using your own subdomains over a CDN is often more beneficial to startups as they save money, although it will cost a little at first in time.

Also admittedly I've very little experience with commercial CDN solutions (but this will change soon I think) so didn't feel confident enough to write about it.

I can definitely understand that.

I'd recommend you give Rackspace a try. You can sign up for their CDN for free; they hit you for the storage and bandwidth used, but not per transaction. It's worth just experimenting with in a very simple manner to get familiar with (small text files, css files, and so on). Rackspace has a very convenient web based control panel for moving a smaller number of files into their CDN (and of course APIs).

Amazon's Cloudfront is excellent from the standpoint that you don't need to programatically upload any files into it, Amazon can absorb them to their CDN and then serve the files up thereafter (you just create a dns entry for Cloudfront, like cdn.mysite.com and use the same url structure you would on mysite.com). With Rackspace you have to get the files into their cloud, which can be inconvenient if you're talking huge numbers of individual files.

For less than $5 you can absolutely learn everything a developer would need to know about both of those offerings through experimenting with them.

Thanks for the tips! Will definitely look into it.

I've had some quotes from expensive CDN's starting from $200p/m, do you have any experience with these type? Are they better?

We didn't go with Rackspace/Akamai specifically because they don't have a custom origin pull - pushing your assets somewhere else is at the very least a pain, and if you have images or video that is dynamically sized based on the URL it's pretty much a nonstarter.

We looked at Cloudfront but they don't have an Australian distribution point. In the end we went with EdgeCast (via GoGrid).

Originally we were with Voxel, but they've had a couple network issues in the past month (result of DDoS attacks I think).

Edgecast was one I looked at but more expensive than other options for a site our site, are they better than other CDN's?

They are cheaper through resellers like GoGrid. I believe it is competitive with Cloudfront.

As far as speed, they were among the best as far as we were able to test. There are lots of variables involved though that make it kind of hard to compare - how long things stay in the cache at the edge vs. your traffic patterns, etc.

Yep, it can be a big annoyance to say the least. I'm using Rackspace in this case because I only need to constantly export the same 5,000 to 10,000 data files. My individual embed file sizes are in the low KBs, so AWS was going to murder me on the per transaction costs (low file size, high volume).

> I only need to constantly export the same 5,000 to 10,000 data files.

The same data for most of them, or do they all change?

You might could hash the file contents, add some part of the hash to your deployed file name, and then use that hash to refer to the changed files.

Amazon's CloudFront uses (as you might expect) utility pricing. It's pretty cheap to try out.

It's also dead easy to set up -- you used to have to use S3 for the backend, but now you can have it refer to any server. So you could make cdn.example.com simply pull content from www.example.com and then just replace "www" with "cdn" in your img src's and you're done.

As far as CDNs go, I think CloudFlare has been fantastic. Trivial to use, as well.

yeah, it's almost a game-changer. i'm surprised not too many people here talk about them.

I have started to use CloudFlare on all my sites. It took my sluggish Drupal personal site from a 4.5 second load time down to a paltry 1.6 - 2 second load time.

It's also free - and besides making your site faster, also blocks a lot of the spam you would normally see.

+1 for CloudFlare.com even if you just need free DNS.

CloudFlare randomly goes down for me.

Just last week, their anycast servers in Chicago blocked all traffic and said my server was down even though it wasn't.

It took them about 3 days to fix it, so I am a bit skeptical about using them in a production environment.

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