

So you're using S3 to serve your assets, eh? You should rethink that. - anthony_franco
http://afran.co/so-youre-using-s3-to-serve-your-assets-eh-you

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wpeterson
It's a bad comparison.

If you're going to serve static assets, you're better off using CloudFront
which has better delivery and lets you set proper cache headers so you won't
have to use as much bandwidth.

Aside from serving assets efficiently, being able to store them in a
permanently cacheable scheme is a huge benefit.

We used Cloudfront Asset Host to build this solution at PatientsLikeMe:

<http://github.com/wpeterson/cloudfront_asset_host>

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monwara
I'm surprised that there aren't any well known resellers of Limelight, Level3,
and Akamai. With volume pricing, they are a fraction of the cost of S3 with
the same level of redundancy. I've gotten quotes of $.04/GB and I've heard
from peers that $.01/GB is possible at sufficient volume. Amazon's services
have always seemed overpriced to me.

~~~
gmac
IIRC Rackspace's CloudFiles uses Akamai (having moved off Limelight a while
back).

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monwara
If that's true (which I'm sure it is), then I'm surprised that CloudFiles
pricing structure isn't more competitive. I'm sure they must be getting a huge
volume discount. And their automated provisioning process is the same
regardless of the size of the customer. Maybe they just have fat margins on
that particular product.

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kennu
I wonder if the author was trying to compare S3 costs to running your own
Nginx on EC2 (which involves other cost than just bandwidth), or to some
private datacenter? (Meaning his reference to "taking a huge load off their
application servers")

~~~
dotBen
I think he was comparing S3 to serving the image assets from his application
servers, where if he uses a CDN like MaxCDN, the app severs are only used as
origin servers and the load is minimal.

This assumes you have the disk space on your app servers for ~750gb of data,
though.

I actually agree with him - we use MaxCDN/NetDNA at WPEngine and they are
awesome (although we don't use our app servers as origin servers).

~~~
kennu
Yeah but I didn't quite get if his application servers were on EC2 or not. The
usual comparison is Nginx+EC2 vs. S3 vs. CloudFront. (Now the page is down so
I can't check again..)

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EponymousCoward
Why would CloudFront double his bill? It's $0.12/gb just like S3.

~~~
colinhowe
First read from each edge would be two reads. One to get the data from the
central S3 repo, one to serve to the end user. But, that's not double... after
the first read for each edge the additional read is no longer needed.

~~~
EponymousCoward
My point exactly.

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alexbilbie
We've just successfully moved our assets to Rackspace Cloud which uses
Akamai's backbone and we couldn't be happier. The pricing (UK
<http://lncn.eu/379>; US <http://lncn.eu/bci>) works out much cheaper than S3
and we're experiencing fantastic performance hosting JS and CSS files,
especially over mobile networks.

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bdesimone
Hi Anthony, Go here: <http://friendcameo.com/> Now go here:
<https://plus.google.com/>

... friend cameo facebook video chat girl = google plus video chat girl?

~~~
anthony_franco
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll talk to our designer about that.

