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Comment by PanMan | Hacker News Reader

Interesting datapoint, that the quicker loading of the page made that much a difference. Also I think the conversion ratio of 25% is really high. 1 in 4 getting your app? whow). Anyway, this pushed me to set-up a cloudfront distribution to do some tests. And while sometimes it's really fast, sometimes it is also a lot slower than our normal server (300ms vs 50ms or so).

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Try other CDNs. If you're happy to pay, you can certainly get an awful lot better than Cloudfront.

FTR, Cloudfront is actually insanely expensive, even in comparison to "normally considered super expensive" alternatives such as Akamai.

(edit:) Huh... a few months ago Amazon dropped their bandwidth prices by 20%. These new prices are now more in line with "expensive CDN" as opposed to "more expensive than expensive CDNs". Still much more than I'm paying.

That said, I have never been quoted a "per-request" charge by a CDN, so I'm not certain how much more expensive that extra charge ends up making this service (although, of course, for large content that will amortize pretty quickly).

(Finally, Cloudfront has many fewer abilities than the "real CDNs" I've used, fewer POPs, and the story on "how long does my stuff stay in cache" is unclear. They certainly aren't on my radar yet, although they are slowly getting better.)

> and the story on "how long does my stuff stay in cache" is unclear

It sounds like you haven't really looked at CloudFront.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#How_long_will_Amazon_...

No. If I download a few hundred 5GB files through Cloudfront and mark them by setting a Cache-Control header of 1 year, Amazon is not keeping that stuff at the edge. The rate at which things are prematurely purged is a key variable in differentiating CDNs. The fact that people (apparently, such as yourself, despite the dismissive tone you took in your comment) don't understand stuff like this is what Amazon counts on, and is why they are getting as many clients as they do.

Can you provide more info ? I'm interested in what CDNs do you think are better ?

MaxCDN (subsidiary of NetDNA). They're faster, the support tools are substantially better (invalidation on Cloudfront is the very definition of "suck"), the uptime is better, and the cost is a LOT lower.

Their support for .Net isn't very good, so it took me a while to get things working for their REST services. Overall a much better product with much better support.

CDNetworks, we tested global page load times with Gomez. CDNetworks was more stable and usually slightly faster.

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