11–20 of 63 posts
We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.
I made the switch from Rackspace Cloudfiles + CDN to Amazon S3 + Cloudfront a couple months ago. I was regularly getting emails about my app erroring when someone uploaded a file via my app to Rackspace, since Rackspace was down (or responding slowly). Now I'm happy with Amazon S3 + Cloudfront, it's cheaper and more stable.
I wish we could use CloudFront. Unfortunately they charge a bit for custom SSL ($600/zone/mo). Not that fun for a startup. Are you also using that? /R
From what I could tell talking with some people so far, is that they only think they need CDN, while a couple of regular dedicated servers would be just fine. But, then again, most of my customers are in Europe so I can serve files cheaply. In US, I'm currently using FDCServers, which are 3.3x more expensive than equivallent Hetzner server. And this was one of the cheapest I found. I find most Amazon services to be overpriced. IMHO, you're just paying more for the brand name.
We use MaxCDN. It seems to work well, but I find all CDNs fairly opaque. How can I actually measure latency? I can't with web browsers being the way they are, so I really have no way of knowing. (There is http://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/ but it is very limited, and not suitable for us.) Clarification psated from a comment I made below: Sure, I can test my latency, but I'm more interested in what my customers a…
All major browsers allow you to profile each load time of every single resource. Perfect for trying to compare relative latency at a particular location for a particular CDN. Chrome'a is especially good for this sort of thing, look at "network" in the developer tools.
We use MaxCDN. It seems to work well, but I find all CDNs fairly opaque. How can I actually measure latency? I can't with web browsers being the way they are, so I really have no way of knowing. (There is http://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/ but it is very limited, and not suitable for us.) Clarification psated from a comment I made below: Sure, I can test my latency, but I'm more interested in what my customers a…
All major browsers allow you to profile each load time of every single resource. Perfect for trying to compare relative latency at a particular location for a particular CDN. Chrome'a is especially good for this sort of thing, look at "network" in the developer tools.
We switched from Cloudfront to Fastly and couldn't be happier. These guys are awesome and the product is top notch. I highly recommend Fastly. We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.
For example Ninite.com moved to them and now the site is virtually unusable because of it, over 90% of the time I get a "403: Forbidden" error when trying to do anything...like send them feedback on how the website doesn't work...
I even see more HN problems this week and I'm sure its because of them.
We switched from Cloudfront to Fastly and couldn't be happier. These guys are awesome and the product is top notch. I highly recommend Fastly. We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.
I am not sure what the added benefit is (apart from the looks of using your own domain) when using your own custom SSL? Isn't the standard https connection through Cloudfronts wildcard SSL https://somethingsomething.cloudfront.net enough to be on the safe side? Really curious.
Our product (Myna; mynaweb.com) provides a JS client that our customers embed on their web sites. If we give them a Cloudfront URL we have just created a big legacy problem for ourselves if we ever want to move off Cloudfront (and we did and we have!)
If you're creating a pure JS client connecting to an API on a different domain you have to worry about CORS support to get cross site requests. It's not a huge problem but it slows your site down a bit (you have to make two requests to check CORS permissions and then send data, where you could make one without this issue) and you can't support legacy browsers.
So there are a few reasons why using a Cloudfront URL might not be 100% suitable.
Please don't go to Cloudfront, it's truly horrendous (wearing my end user hat) to see so many sites have problems and timeouts because of them. For example Ninite.com moved to them and now the site is virtually unusable because of it, over 90% of the time I get a "403: Forbidden" error when trying to do anything...like send them feedback on how the website doesn't work... I even see more HN problems this week and I'm…
We switched from Cloudfront to Fastly and couldn't be happier. These guys are awesome and the product is top notch. I highly recommend Fastly. We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.