I got my numbers wrong thanks to an early morning typo... 800GB bandwidth per month, not 800MB.
Of the options recommended:
Max CDN = $39.95 per month deal (1TB), usually $99.95 = Same price as DIY on the deal, or more expensive normally.
SoftLayer = $140 per month (1TB) = More expensive.
CacheFly = $299 per month (2TB) = More expensive and have to upload files to server.
Rackspace CloudFiles = $176 per month (based on current 800GB bandwidth alone - other costs not yet factored in) = More expensive.
Amazon CloudFront = $131 per month (based on current 800GB bandwidth alone - other costs not yet factored in) = More expensive and you have to upload files to the server.
So yeah... DIY looks substantially cheaper. There's still a big gap between small site and large site. For a few days of my time I can easily save myself a lot of potential cost as well as speed up my website. I can't really see why I wouldn't set up my own CDN.
When you value your time at $0 lots of things seem cheaper. For $131 a month on CloudFront you get a better CDN than you are going to build and avoid all the sysadmin headaches, syncing headaches, etc.
But the $19.95 linodes have a 200GB/month limit - so you'd need at an absolute minimum of 4 to do 800GB/month, and given you won't have perfect geographical spread, about 6-8 is perhaps more realistic. So you'd be looking at least $120 for the VPS, plus the time/hassle of setting this up and managing/monitoring it.
So it's just as expensive, and there's no way the DIY model would be cheaper in terms of TCO.
I already host with Linode and they pool the bandwidth allowance for all Linodes in your account.
As I've already got nicely layered VMs some have a totally unused allowance. For example my MySQL nodes only transfer traffic on the private network at Linode and so both the master server and slave use virtually zilch of their bandwidth allowance.
I'm fairly sure that most Linode users with more than 1 node will be using only a fraction of their allowance.
My total pooled bandwidth allowance with Linode is close to 4TB, of which in total I'm using only 1TB with 800GB being static content.
My point was simple: The DIY solution with Linode looks to be a really good idea as I already am with them and placing CDN servers in other datacenters should mean good routing internally within their network (or peers) as well as being extremely cheap.
I have yet to be shown that for my scenario there is a cheaper option and that this is solved. I am very happy to be proven wrong as it will save me some work, but so far DIY is winning.
We were doing the same, if not more, at massify. We used Panther Express which doesn't bill on amount, but instead on how much of their pipe you are using.
Of the options recommended:
Max CDN = $39.95 per month deal (1TB), usually $99.95 = Same price as DIY on the deal, or more expensive normally.
SoftLayer = $140 per month (1TB) = More expensive.
CacheFly = $299 per month (2TB) = More expensive and have to upload files to server.
Rackspace CloudFiles = $176 per month (based on current 800GB bandwidth alone - other costs not yet factored in) = More expensive.
Amazon CloudFront = $131 per month (based on current 800GB bandwidth alone - other costs not yet factored in) = More expensive and you have to upload files to the server.
So yeah... DIY looks substantially cheaper. There's still a big gap between small site and large site. For a few days of my time I can easily save myself a lot of potential cost as well as speed up my website. I can't really see why I wouldn't set up my own CDN.