Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

[monkeyevil]

So I'm hosting with Miva, which has been fine so far. But the past couple years I've been pushing 150-175GB a month of transfer and the costs seem a little much IMHO.

I'd like to lower my costs, and maybe even get more speed for my users by going to CloudFront, but I'm not 100% sure how that would work with the image machine. Anyone have experience with this?

Our site if you're interested.
http://www.jcroffroad.com

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

I think you'd find something like Yottaa or Cloudflare would be the best way to reduce your bandwidth, however they'd likely be a lot more expensive than what you're paying us for Bandwidth.

However if you go that route, you get the rest of the benefits of a CDN which can be sizeable.

As for using Image Machine with offsite storage of images, that's not possible AFAIK.

[monkeyevil]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

I think you'd find something like Yottaa or Cloudflare would be the best way to reduce your bandwidth, however they'd likely be a lot more expensive than what you're paying us for Bandwidth.

However if you go that route, you get the rest of the benefits of a CDN which can be sizeable.

As for using Image Machine with offsite storage of images, that's not possible AFAIK.

Thanks for the response Rick. I think a lot of it is shell shock from moving up from cheap shared hosting.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

I should say I'm a big fan of using a CDN, for what it's worth.

[monkeyevil]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

I should say I'm a big fan of using a CDN, for what it's worth.

It sounds great to me, and CloudFront is presented as a CDN. It means I'll have to change up the way I display images on the site however since everything is already using image machine.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

I'm not familiar with CloudFront at all, so I can't say for sure. If you're trying to put the images directly onto CloudFront and just reference them, then I don't think the Image Machine will work.

If it works like Yottaa or CloudFlare then you still use MM and Image Machine the same way and it caches them on it's own while still leaving the "master" file on our servers. This method should work without any issues.

[monkeyevil]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

Cloudflare looks like a great (almost too good to be true) option, thanks for the idea!

[kayakbabe]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

did you go with cloudflare? How did it work out for you?

[monkeyevil]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

did you go with cloudflare? How did it work out for you?

It's been working great. Has cut my data transfer considerably.

[alphabet]

Re: Amazon S3 or CloudFront for images?

I am looking to use a CDN and have a few questions.

1. Is the html page being cached, if so how do you separate dynamic content in the html file such as session_ids, cookies?
2. If it is only static assets such as images, css and js being served from a CDN do you have to go through each page and modify the hrefs?
3. Are there any modifications to the image machine that need to be done to know the CDN url?
4. How do CDN's serve secure assets?

TIA