Do you have your wonderful towel handy?



Some of you may or may not have noticed that all the images (or nearly so) on the forums are coming from a weird location.

....cloudfront.net

I have signed up and am paying for Amazon Tier 1 cloud webserving. Basically all the images I point to there are retrieved from the server here and then served from amazon's massive bandwidth pipe. Also, the images are scattered around the country and overseas in realtime so when a users gets an image it is coming from the server closest to them. And man is it fast!


This includes all the banners being served as well. What it does not include is attachments as those are stored as data unfortunately. I may be able to figure that out in the long run though.

Here's the catch. There is no set fee. Rather is priced totally on usage. That means I have no idea how much I will be paying from month to month. Gulp. I am going to run this for a few days to see if I can get a feel for how much this will cost. If it's reasonable it will stay. If not, well, I don't know yet.


I have already seen my bandwidth here cut into about 1/8th of what it was. Holy hell! That's a huge savings in bandwidth. Though that doesn't represent a cost savings for me as its still the same monthly bill. It just means I have more room to grow and the speed will not suffer. For now, its just in testing and its better for all the members as its 1000 times the bandwidth I could ever have here. I have implemented this across most of my forums and some paying clients as well.

Just wanted to keep you in the loop in case someone wonders why that domain is showing up as they use the forums.

Alex