I know this doesn't add value but if you think CloudFront is expensive you should see how much CDNs used to cost before CloudFront came around. The fact it doesn't change you for the bandwidth between S3 and CloudFront is key too.

Try pricing it against Google https://cloud.google.com/cdn/pricing and Level3 http://www.level3.com/en/products/content-delivery-network/

As someone mentioned, CloudFlare initial seems cheaper but you give up some stuff like control of your DNS and they can shut you off or start showing CAPTCHAs at any time unless you pay for their higher plans. Which might be worth it, you have to weight the pros and cons.

CloudFront is one of the slowest CDNs out there.

CloudFlare is okay as long as you pay $200/month. That's nothing in the CDN world. Amazon wants $600/month just to deploy a SSL cert on CloudFront.

> Amazon wants $600/month just to deploy a SSL cert on CloudFront

That's a bit misleading Amazon SSL is free on CloudFront if you are OK with SNI. And almost every is now... browsers without SNI are virtually none. The only browser with any market use that does not support it is IE 8 on Windows XP!

Have a look at edgemesh[1]. They are doing an interesting take on CDN.

Disclosure: they run on my day-job's systems.

[1] https://edgemesh.com/

If you need to do video, check out https://advection.net/

We beat CloudFront pricing by 50..80% in most cases.

(I am a co-founder)

The cheapest cdn I'm aware of is OVH's. https://www.ovh.ie/cdn/

Cloudfront gets much cheaper at volume, you have to commit to usage though. But it's a huge cost savings over list price.

Check out KeyCDN.

I second KeyCDN, we switched to them a while back because CloudFront had a mystery problem with SSL certs that bit us. KeyCDN has been superb.

Cloudflare?

I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion on HN, but I had the misfortune of using CloueFlare when they first started and experienced firsthand how amateurish the team behind it was. I tried them again three years ago and didn't see anything to change my opinion. The security incident last year cemented it for me.

Thanks for your suggestion (honestly) but we won't ever be using CloudFlare so long as I have a say in it.

They've definitely improved since then. You need to be on the $200/month plan and basically turn off the WAF (which is craptastic), then things are pretty good.

All software has bugs. They just got unlucky, though their handling of the situation did raise a bunch of red flags.

I was considering using cloudflare as a free static asset CDN. On several of the speed test rankings they show cloudflare at or near the top.

I also have my dns with them on the free tier. But I am not running my regular traffic through their Network. I just plan to create a subdomain and run js, css, and images through it.

Would this not be recommended? Free CDN does seem too good to be true.

They explicitly forbid that use case in their ToS, so no, it is not recommended.

Oh, that is good to know. I had no idea that wasn't allowed.