Contend Delivery Networks (CDN s) pricing is typically broken into bandwidth tiers plus a charge separate storage charge. To simplify comparison I have used the base bandwidth and storage of each plan for the CDN’s which publish pricing, others such as Level3, Akamai, Edgecast etc usually have a high minimum charge and are not suitable for smaller content publishers.
For comparison purposes the base plan for each CDN has been chosen which for all providers offers at least 5TB of bandwidth out. Other charges such as transactions and bandwidth have been ignored for this comparison as these usually do not have a significant impact on the final cost.
CDN Pricing (March 2010)
| Storage (per GB) |
Bandwidth Out (per GB) |
Bandwidth Out > 50TB (per GB) |
|
| Amazon CloudFront | 0.15 | 0.15 | 0.10 |
| Rackspace CloudFiles | 0.15 | 0.22 | 0.22 |
| MaxCDN | 0.995 | 0.10 | 0.075 |
| SimpleCDN | * | 0.03 | 0.02 |
*SimpleCDN does not have a separate storage charge, pricing is in plans for a set amount of storage and bandwidth and overages are not allowed (you are required to upgrade to the next plan). The base plan used for this pricing comparison has 2GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth per month.
Observations:
- RackSpace CloudFiles is by far the most expensive CDN, especially in a high bandwidth environment (although the storage is cheaper than MaxCDN) . Its integration with RackSpace Cloud Servers and Cloud Sites mean it will still be a decent choice for RackSpace users who don’t have high bandwidth requirements.
- SimpleCDN is by far the cheapest CDN although the plan structure will make it much more expensive. You are required to select a set plan which a fixed monthly cost (eg $150 for 5TB bandwidth and 2GB storage), so if you only use 1TB of bandwidth this would work out at around $0.15 per GB. Similarly storage is a fixed amount and you are required to upgrade to a more expensive plan if your storage exceeds the plan amount. This is inflexible and means the actual cost per GB of storage and bandwidth will be much higher than the published amounts.
- Amazon’s storage (ie Amazon Simple Storage Solution – S3) works out much cheaper than other providers for very large storage amounts (eg >500TB of storage is priced at $0.105 per GB). It should be noted that CloudFront is not as tightly integrated into its S3 storage as the other providers. The CloudFront CDN is essentially a blot-on service to the S3 storage service. This makes CloudFront a bit more complicated to use although there are several third-party integration tools.