Company profile
Amazon CloudFront is a web service CDN for delivery of static and streaming content. It integrates well with other Amazon Web Services but can be used stand-alone too, via an extensive API. Amazon Cloudfront has POPs in US, EU, Asia, Australia and South-America and offers a no-commitments price plan.
Network Map
Amazon CloudFront has many edge servers in the US, Europe, Asia, Australia and South-America, but not (yet) in China.
Pricing & Contract duration
Cloudfront charges $0.0075 to $0.0220 per 10,000 requests, on top of the costs for data transfer. Visit their pricing table for more information.
| Pricing & Contract duration | |
|---|---|
| Price US/EU traffic - low volume | $0.12 per GB |
| Price US/EU traffic - high volume | $0.02 per GB, at 5000 TB per month |
| Extra charge for APAC region traffic | 58% $0.19 / GB for Hong Kong & Singapore and $0.201 / GB for Japan |
| Storage | FreeS3 storage charges may apply for S3 backed distributions. |
Note: custom price plans are very common in the CDN market, especially for large volume customers. We recommend you always talk to the CDN provider about your needs and requirements and work with them to get a best-fit deal.
Features & Support
Amazon CloudFront offers many of the features you may expect from a CDN, like Origin-Pull, Purge and Gzip compression. It's good to know that the control panel is very limited: you really need to use the CDN via the API. Also, unless you pay extra, you cannot call or email AWS for support.
| Features & Support | |
|---|---|
| Origin-Pull |  Origin pull is called "Custom Origin" when creating a new Cloudfront distribution. |
| Push (upload to CDN servers) | To use push, set the Cloudfront distribution to use "Amazon S3 Origin" as the source. |
| Purge | Cloudfront charges $0.005 per file purged. 1,000 purges are free per month. |
| Purge All |  |
| Gzip | Only if origin server does Gzip |
| Persistent connections | |
| Honors all origin server headers | |
| Can override origin server headers | |
| Set caching headers for pushed files | |
| Custom CNAMEs | There is a limit of 10 CNAMEs per distribution. |
| HTTPS | |
| Control Panel & statistics | |
| Access Logs | Access logs can be optionally written to a S3 bucket. |
| API | |
| Support | By default aws only provides a forum for community support. Premium support is available at extra charges. |