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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

You pay $600 per month for each custom SSL certificate associated with one or more CloudFront distributions.

This is... impressively expensive.

Not when you think about what's going on behind the scenes. There are 40 CloudFront datacenters, which means all 40 of them have to have a dedicated IP and setup just for you and your SSL certificate.

If they're not using SNI I agree that it would be expensive... not necessarily that expensive, though. Elastic IP addresses cost $0.005/hour, which is about $3.60/month; multiply that by 40 datacenters and you've got $144/month worth of IPs, not $600.

Problem with SNI is that you lose IE users on XP. In the UK at least, that means entire organisations with thousands of employees such as Lloyds bank and the NHS. According to our stats anyway.

The way that many CDNs do this is to use a certificate with multiple names for many of their clients in clusters. Check the certificate on https://cydia.saurik.com/ for an example of this.

That's a no-go for a lot of corporate users, though.

do note that it's per cert. you could, for example, use a wildcard cert and serve multiple distributions & fqdns off a single cert.

ps: check out the insane pricing for dedicated certs & https on some other CDNs. $600/mo doesnt look too excessive in comparison.

I think it's the going rate. A wildcard cert from edgecast is similarly priced (plus a setup fee).

Not compared to how expensive CloudFront is. cough

I guess it depends on what scale you're at. Granted it was a few years ago, but I had a hard time getting the big name CDNs to give me the time of day without spending at least a few grand a month.

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