Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much does that really matter? Even going to the otherside of the world is only 200ms or so, and the time taken to run rubygems is hardly a factor in just about any workflow I can imagine. Think of it another way - what would be more valuble - RubyGems hosted on CDN, or RubyGems on DO and give a couple of grants for talent hackers to work on their gems fulltime for a few months. (ala GSoC) Even if you ARE concerne…
Person who pays the bill here. Latency does matter and we're paying an additional $1.5k new in Feb to improve european latency. RubyCentral can afford to spend the money to improve latency issues, so we do!
A self set up Linode CDN with all six location Tokyo, JP London, UK Newark, NJ Atlanta, GA Dallas, TX Fremont, CA
Would have provided 48TB of Pooled bandwidth at a very decent speed and cost around $480. Linode's Network are great, much better then DO. I am not sure if it match CloudFront, which isn't exactly the fastest CDN anyway.