Is Amazon CloudFront right for me?

Here’s what the pricing looks like. Learn more about Amazon CloudFront at http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront.

United States Edge Locations

Data Transfer

$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.120 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.090 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests
$0.010 per 10,000 GET requests

I evaluated AWS for hosting a while back and concluded that the bandwidth and storage costs were just too expensive if you have even a modest amount of storage traffic needs. Here’s the breakdown:

A dedicated 100Mbit line can xfer 30TB/month. Costs $1000/mo, or $10/Mbit/mo. Source: CalPOP. (I host here).

From AWS @ $0.120/GB that’s $3600/mo. If you’re pushing sizable volumes of bits, it seems like it will only make sense to do this under 2 scenarios:

  1. you can benefit from having a >100Mbit/s cap b/c you have *very* spiky traffic. you xfer well over 400Mbit/s for a few hours/day (and 0Mbit/s the rest), and
  2. you need lower latency than a 1-2 datacenter network can give you

I suspect most for most of their target clients it’s [2], or clients that are really in it for the whole S3/EC2/SQS/EBS bundle. Being able to rent cores at $0.10/hour can be really attractive for some types of services.

So no, it’s not right for me. YMMV.