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:
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.
You're right, Amazon is overpriced for large file storage and delivery, but the devil is in the details.
By way of comparison, we (advection.net) have footprint in US, Europe, and SE Asia, and for large online video streaming clients we routinely charge about 1/3rd of the CDN mentioned in the blog.
But I'd venture it's less about price, and more about what you're trying to do.
For example, you might want to use AWS for your application hosting, and MaxCDN for your static web assets, and someone like us for streaming video. Unlike Amazon S3 or even CloudFront, for video you may want someone supporting native streaming protocols[1] including Apple's adaptive HTTP live streaming or Microsoft's SSTP.
Keep in mind the brand name CDNs you mention charge extra for everything on top of their bandwidth price. The bandwidth price might seem lower, but if you divide all the "extras" (like, say, reporting, tokens, or live URLs) by your usage, it's generally costing you more. Meanwhile, S3's storage might seem lower, but their price is per location and they charge you between S3 and CloudFront, while ours is a single rate with no charge to distribute from hubs to edges.
Besides delivering from our footprint, we also handle distributing traffic across other CDNs if you have a very large event or want multi-CDN traffic/cost management. As volume buyers and with our provisioning tools, we can offer you a blended rate often less than you can get on your own, or you can "bring your own CDN" and we'll distribute the traffic according to your specs. (From 2001 to 2008 we were solely private labeling video delivery on behalf of major CDNs that didn't have video delivery capability built yet, so we can provide a lot of help with multi-CDN integration needs, such as multi-CDN rollup logs and reporting.)
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.
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")
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).
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..)
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.
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.
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