Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

Re:Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet by dgreensp on Thursday May 30, 2013 @11:00AM (#5792908)

I tried imgix for thumbnails in a web photo album. It was much slower (higher latency) and double the price per bandwidth of Amazon Cloudfront. In general, then, resizing all the images in advance and serving them from a traditional CDN offers a better experience at a better price. Only if that's impossible is imgix a good choice.

Being a premium CDN seems a bit like being a premium credit card processor -- as customers grow, they have more and more incentive to switch to a commodity alternative.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet by dgreensp on Thursday May 30, 2013 @11:23AM (#5793046)

To be more constructive:

- Be competitive on price and performance for the basic CDN use case

- Amazon's strategy is to pass on their own costs with a very small margin. If you are serving each Zillow thumbnail by resizing it once in a while on a GPU and caching it in RAM, your costs should be tiny. Then you are just over-charging for bandwidth.

Biggest take-away is think hard about the pricing model. Maybe have big tiers with flat prices and pass on the bandwidth at cost.

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Re:Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet by qhoxie on Thursday May 30, 2013 @01:12PM (#5793751)

I think that "double the price per bandwidth" figure is way off – where did you get that? imgix pricing looks to be about a 30% premium over the US CloudFront pricing, and much less than that internationally (imgix doesn't appear to distinguish).

[ Parent | on HN ]