transfer out:
Amazon: $0.17-$0.22/GB, simpleCDN $0.09/GB
transfer in:
Amazon: something, simpleCDN: nothing
requests:
Both: $0.01/10k requests
So yeah, you might save a few pennies on bandwidth, but SimpleCDN would kill you on storage it seems.
They do seem to offer another product that they call "SimpleCDN S3+", that I assume is their equivilant of S3, since the prices are about the same. Is that what you were comparing?
Uh... at the risk of repeating myself... are you sure you're reading the right pricing chart?
According to SimpleCDN's website, their S3+ service is not a content deliver network. It has US and EU locations, just like S3. So sure, it's cheaper than S3, but the thing they offer that competes with CloudPoint is potentially bit more expensive than CloudPoint, depending on the disposition of your content.
And I think you missed the part where you don't get charged for moving things around between S3 and CloudPoint. And the part where you can set your caching however you like, just like you would for any file you serve from a traditional webserver.
We trialed SimpleCDN in some simple cases for files I've had on it, and the performance was pretty bad as measured by Pingdom across the world. I love the idea and wanted them to be good, but it simply couldn't perform for us and always seemed to be serving from some place in the central U.S.
Maybe they've gotten better in the past few months, but they didn't do much for us except for give us a reliable alternative hosting location. The performance never seemed to improve worldwide-- almost as if they don't have many edge servers.
the difference is that cloudfront is backed by Amazon. So this means 2 things: a) it won't be going out of business any time soon b) if AWS goes down, usually so will the main amazon site. So you'll have hundreds of techies working to fix your issue.
Its mostly a trust issue...everyone heard of akamai, everyone heard of limelight, everyone heard of AWS.
AWS is a separate wing from the Amazon site, they buy their own servers and datacenters. There have already been numerous S3 and EC2 outages.
You won't get any support at AWS unless you pay for a premium contract. And, unlike SimpleCDN, there is no SLA with CloudFront yet.
While everyone has indeed heard of AWS, they are not in the same category yet with Akamai and Limelight just because they released a CDN product.
In each case, for the sake of a discount solution, you are probably sacrificing reliability, bulletproof contracts/SLAs, and a TON of presence locations vs. something like Akamai.
I like my brands just as much as anyone, but I think you're taking just as much chances with SimpleCDN vs. CloudFront. And with SimpleCDN you get better prices and an SLA that offers refunds for outages (which is better than nothing).
While I'm not a customer of either SimpleCDN or CloudFront yet, this looks easy enough to deal with:
It's also MUCH cheaper than CloudFront: Also from that page: "There are no contracts or monthly minimum fees, etc."It looks like they don't have nearly the reach that something like Akamai or Limelight has (but comparable to CloudFront currently):
For a small to medium sized project, this is what I would personally sign up for rather than CloudFront.