Choosing a CDN for big projects can be a daunting task. Amazon’s CloudFront service offers excellent infrastructure features, solid protection options, and integration with Amazon Web Services. The speed performance is outstanding, and there are many options to tweak around.
Amazon is a name that carries weight, which is why it’s no surprise that CloudFront has as many as 13 regional edge caches and 215 edge locations worldwide. Suppose your site content cannot be cached from the nearby edge location. In that case, the service will pick it up from the closest regional cache. This allows site visitors to access the website pages more quickly, wherever they are, giving your sites better SEO rankings compared to using free CDN providers.
CloudFront also allows its users to optimize content delivery according to its demand. When the site visit is high, Amazon’s service will send more resources and power to follow up on the requests. After the site’s traffic demands decrease, the resources will be transferred to other sites.
One feature that offers excellent long-term benefits is the integration with AWS. Many of Amazon Web Service features that CloudFront users get access to have set the industry standards. The AWS Certificate Manager helps when handling a bunch of unique SSL certificates, where other CDN network providers might stumble around. On the other hand, the AWS Web Application Firewall secures site content from common cyberattacks. At the same time, the AWS Shield protects from DDoS attacks.
Users also have access to a vast number of options once they select the Create Selection button. Most of them are not needed for managing simpler content. However, advanced users will find many useful features to ease the burden on the server. We managed to get an average response time of around 30 ms with a bit of tweaking, which puts Amazon CloudFront at the forefront of top CDN hosting services.
The pricing is a double-edged sword here since you pay on-demand, but many services can add up the costs quickly. New users get 50 GB of data out monthly traffic for an entire year, along with two million HTTP/HTTPS requests and CloudFront Function Invocations per month completely free. In theory, the “pay for what you use” pricing should be a more economical solution. However, many minor aspects quickly add to the total cost, so it can get expensive quickly.
Costs like regional data transfers start from $0.085 for every used GB a month, depending on your content location. This pricing system can stack up unfavorably faster than with other CDN companies that have more uniform and straightforward costs. Data transfers to Origin cost more than $0.020 per GB. HTTP/HTTPS requests also rack up costs very quickly.
Final Thoughts
If you don’t mind the complex pricing scheme with rapidly increasing costs, Amazon CloudFront brings excellent infrastructure, security, and AWS features to the table. Couple that with top-tier speed performance and server load tweaking options, and you’ll get a fantastic CDN service.