Evaluating few CDN options

Recently, I was evaluating CDN options for a client with some unique challenges. We ended up using Amazon CloudFront, but ill detail the options we looked at and what let us to this decision. Some things to note:- The providers we looked at :- MaxCDN: Almost sealed the deal. Pros:- Cons:- EdgeCast: Looked good at first, but poor gziping. Pros:- Cons:- CDNetworks: Didn't look past price Cons:- Amazon CloudFront: WIN Pros:- Cons:- Sidenote : Requests from CloudFront to origin are HTTP 1.0 . Nginx by default does not serve gzip to 1.0 request. gzip_http_version setting must be changed in order to use nginx as origin for CloudFront. The system we architected adds something based on the file mtime as a part of the URL, so now we don't need to any purges at the CDN. Also now we can have far future expires on all CDN'd objects cause if something changes, the URL would automagically change. For us, the price and features are important, but whats more important is the results. We went with the provider with lesser features just because our pages loaded fastest with them.
Tags: pagespeed site performance
Categories: Webmaster Things