3 ms·

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 us

by shingen 15y ago

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.

TomGullen 15y ago
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?
dminor 15y ago
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).
- TomGullen 15y ago
  Edgecast was one I looked at but more expensive than other options for a site our site, are they better than other CDN's?
  - dminor 15y ago
    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.
- shingen 15y ago
  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).
  - mikescar 15y ago
    > 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.

by shingen 15y ago

TomGullen 15y ago

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?

dminor 15y ago

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).

TomGullen 15y ago
Edgecast was one I looked at but more expensive than other options for a site our site, are they better than other CDN's?
- dminor 15y ago
  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.
shingen 15y ago
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).
- mikescar 15y ago
  > 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.