Comparing CDN Performance
View Part 2 Here
More and more CDN providers are appearing with competing prices and features. Here I’m going to compare Amazon Cloud Front, Rackspace Cloud Files, and Amazon S3.
First off, Amazon S3 isn’t really a CDN per se, but I’ve ran across quite a few sites comparing Rackspace Cloud to S3, which isn’t a fair comparison. Amazon S3 does, however, have its own strong points which we will get into later.
Response Time
We will start by taking a look at the response time for the three services over a period of 1 month
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- Response time over 1 month for Amazon S3
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- Response time over 1 month for Amazon Cloud Front
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- Response time over 1 month for Rackspace Cloud Files
The average response time for Amazon S3 was 819ms which is pretty bad. However, S3 was never really meant to be a CDN, this is what their Cloud Front service is for. After looking at the Cloud Front average response time we can see it to be 310ms, a much better response time. And then there’s Rackspace Cloud Files, coming in at 210ms, which is even better. Rackspace Cloud Files uses Limelight for their CDN solution which is one of the industry leaders in content delivery, up there with Akamai. I would have done a comparison to Akamai, however I lack the funds to even get close to that. Rackspace Cloud makes it easy to be able to use the “big guys” infrastructure without having to pay the big price. More…
Setup a Source Dedicated Server
I threw together a quick video tutorial you can watch here showing how quickly and easily you can get a Source Dedicated Server up and running with Rackspace Cloud servers, check it out!
Setup your own web server in minutes.
I threw together a quick video tutorial you can watch here showing how quickly and easily you can get a LAMP server with WordPress up and running in just minutes with Rackspace Cloud servers, check it out!
Use Chrome, Safari, or Opera for Netflix Streaming.
Here’s a quick video I put together showing how to get Safari, Opera, and Chrome working with Netflix’s instant streaming.
NOTE: If you change Chrome’s useragent in the way described, all chrome windows will have that new useragnet. This can lead to problems with some sites. I’ve only noticed Gmail not working. To fix it, remove the custom useragent, or create two seperate shortcuts to Chrome, one for Netflix and one for all other browsing.
Update: Netflix now supports Chrome
Check your useragnet string here.
More…