Amazon S3 or CloudFront?

Hi Craig,

Sorry but that article just confused me more I'm afraid. What's your opinion?

Ultimately a CDN is not just about bandwidth but also being able to deliver the data fast enough with potentially 1000s of connections.

A server is just like a normal computer - though a lot more expensive due to better components.

They are limited to how much data they can send, and also by the number of connections.

The internet is lots of interconnected computers, and they pass data down a chain using various protocols to ensure the data arrived in one piece.

The long chain introduces something called latency, which is the response time. If signals get bounced back and forth, this can cause all kinds of problems.

When people play computer games over the net, especially FPS, "lag" gets you killed as someone has probably fragged you before you can even see them.

Amazon Cloudfront stores the data in multiple locations

United States

* Ashburn, VA
* Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
* Los Angeles, CA
* Miami, FL
* Newark, NJ
* Palo Alto, CA
* Seattle, WA
* St. Louis, MO

Europe

* Amsterdam
* Dublin
* Frankfurt
* London

Asia

* Hong Kong
* Tokyo

That brings it closer to where the people are using it, and they store it on multiple servers so more people can access it at the same time.

WordPress plugins exist for lots of different platforms, and many of the plugins provide other optimization as well.

The options I was offering would probably halve the bandwidth cost of most product launches.