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

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…