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CloudFront CDN Review: Fast, Highly-Secure and Programmable CDN. Is It Worth its Salt?
Genuine CloudFront reviews powered by real people opinions on Twitter. See what real users are saying about Amazon CloudFront on Twitter to help you decide whether you should buy CDN from CloudFront
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Genuine CloudFront review (2021 update) from real people on Twitter to help you make the best-informed decision whether or not you should buy CDN from Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network is built on a reliable infrastructure that allows for amazing speeds and adaptability that adjusts to the most current of your website needs.
Amazon CloudFront also offers simple functionality, integration with other Amazon Web Services, the distribution of websites, as well as other web applications, plus so much more.
Take advantage of Amazon CloudFront’s free tier and set up an account today. The free tier includes 50 GB data transfer out, 2 million HTTP and HTTPS requests. CloudFront’s cheapest paid CDN plan is Pay for what you use per month.
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) and integrates with other Amazon Web Services.
It’s a globally-distributed CDN network of global proxy servers which cache content to improve access speed for downloading this content locally where the end-user is based.
Chris Pinkham, Benjamin Black, and Chris Brown are considered the founders of Amazon Web Services (which CF is part of) and CloudFront officially launched in November 2008.
CloudFront has servers located in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, as well as in several major cities in the United States. The service operates from 54 edge locations on five continents.
Founded by Chris Pinkham, Benjamin Black and Chris Brown in 2006.
Amazon CloudFront Features
Although cost-effective, Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network has a lot to offer. The service is built on a reliable infrastructure that allows for amazing speeds and adaptability that adjusts to the most current of your website needs.
Amazon CloudFront also offers simple functionality, integration with other Amazon Web Services, the distribution of websites as well as other web applications, plus so much more.
There are several benefits a CDN offers to enhance your website
Faster website speed
Improved SEO rankings due to faster site speeds
Higher conversion rates for e-commerce
Manage traffic spikes by distributing network traffic across servers
Increased reliability
Additional security features
Better protection against DDoS attacks
Detailed analytics
Helps to save bandwidth provided by web host
Cloud Infrastructure
One aspect that sets Amazon CloudFront’s apart from its competitors is its cloud-based delivery system that offers 2 key benefits: unshakable reliability and elasticity.
With the cloud network around, your website’s content is cached on Amazon CloudFront’s vast edge servers while also being stored in the cloud.
This, in turn, gives the content a much larger spread of power and more storage to draw from, which means your end users can pull up the various pages of your website more quickly.
Additionally, the cloud-based delivery system allows your content to be delivered as per the demand.
So, when a huge number of surfers are trying to access your content at the same time, Amazon CloudFront diverges most of its power and utilities to your site so as to match the demand. And, when the demand subsides, the extra power and utilities are then transferred to other sites.
Versatile Functionality
Amazon CloudFront allows you to create 2 types of distributions: web distribution for HTTP/HTTPS protocols and distribution for RMTP and its variants.
This simply means that the service can be used to distribute website content (both static and dynamic), web applications, as well as audio transmissions, videos, media files, and documents.
Ideal for Small Business, Publishers, and Developers
This makes Amazon CloudFront an ideal option for all a wide range of people ranging from website owners to app developers and people who deal with media content delivery.
How Does CloudFront Increase Website Speeds?
Here’s how CloudFront works to increase your website speed:
Your customer visits your website
They request one or more file, e.g. an image
The Domain Name Server routes the request to the best (usually the nearest) CloudFront edge location
In the edge location, CloudFront checks the cache for the file
If the file is found, CloudFront sends it to your customer
If the requested file is not found, CloudFront checks the specifications in your distribution and sends the file request to the origin server
The origin server sends the requested file back to the CloudFront edge location
As soon as the file starts arriving, CloudFront forwards the first bytes to your customer
CloudFront adds the file to the edge location for the next time
Video above: Get an introduction to the concepts behind Amazon CloudFront.
Compatibility with All Amazon Web Services
Amazon CloudFront’s hardware is designed to fully integrate with all the other Amazon Web Services ranging from Amazon S3 to EC2, and from SNS to SES. CloudFront also integrates seamlessly with CloudBerry Explorer, an easy to use file manager.
Therefore, you can bring the advantages of these services over to your website and thus give it a competitive edge over other sites similar to yours.
Easy Account Management with AWS Management Console
Amazon offers a wide range of web services, which might get overwhelming for some business owners. That is where the AWS Management Console comes into play. The AWS Management Console allows you to manage all aspects of your account, even on the go.
This includes wizards and workflows for creating your own solutions, monitoring your monthly spend by service, managing security features, and setting up new IAM users. The console is simple and intuitive for most users and includes a search function so you can easily find what you need.
Setup and Ease of Use
Done straight from the website’s detail page, setting up Amazon CloudFront is an easy process that can be finished in as little as 5 minutes. And regardless of what content you want to be distributed, you can be sure that your account dashboard will be easy to learn and in most cases can be customized or accessed via SmartPhones and certain mobile apps.
The CloudFront site shows how easy it is to set up an account.
Wide Range of Security Features
Amazon CloudFront offers security from several different angles. In addition to the usual SSL certificates, this service also supports a wide range of security software that allows you to do everything from restricting content delivery in some countries to enforcing HTTP-only connection between CloudFront and your origin web server.
Amazon offers DDoS protection in their two-tiered AWS Shield protection service which offers automatic inline mitigations to keep your site up and running as smoothly as possible.
For most sites, the Standard Shield is enough, but those with large or sensitive data sets may choose to employ AWS Shield Advanced.
They also offer AWS Web Application Firewall, which helps protect your web apps from common threats.
You can easily control traffic and even deploy custom rules to block specific attack patterns. AWS WAF is infinitely customizable and you only pay for what you use.
And thanks to Amazon Web Services compatibility, you can integrate AWS WAF and other AWS security software as an additional security measure.
Help and Customer Support
With Amazon CloudFront, you can access one-on-one, fast reply support from skilled technical support engineers. You can even go as far as requesting personalized support from the support engineers. The only downside is that the company charges its clients for the support.
Video above: Takashi Yagita, a senior engineer at Canon, discusses the quality of AWS customer support.
Is CloudFront Right for Your Business?
There are benefits and drawbacks to Amazon Cloudfront. Perform an assessment to determine your business needs to see if it’s a good fit.
Pros
Bases charges on actual usage of the service.
Integrates seamlessly with AWS with basically no setup.
Amazon CloudFront is a pay-as-you-go service which means you can cancel a CDN plan at any time without incurring any loses or charges.
Has a good global presence with servers spread over various continents including North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Is fitted with a private content feature that allows you to control who gets access to your content.
Provides report charts that let you track trends in data transfer and requests for your website.
Cons
Charges extra for customer support.
With Amazon CloudFront, you can distribute just about any type of web content while enjoying the company’s vast security options, powerful storage, integration capabilities, and acceleration components.
This makes it a very capable CDN for all sorts of businesses as is clearly seen by the company’s client list, which ranges from popular brands such as Virgin Atlantic to smaller start-ups such as Rent Jungle.
Still, have questions? We answered some of the most common questions about CloudFront below.
Why does site speed matter for my site?
One of the main benefits of using CloudFront is that it helps increase the speed with which your site loads. But is it really that important? As it turns out, yes. An increase in site load time results in a higher bounce rate, which means the longer your site takes to load, the more people will give up and head back to the search results to find another site. Studies show that shaving milliseconds off your load time can increase revenue.
In addition to how site speed affects users, sites like Google and Facebook look at how fast your site loads to determine how often to show your content to users, which means fast load times are good for SEO. Google PageSpeed Insights is a helpful resource for finding out where your site stands.
How does CloudFront speed my site up?
CloudFront is a CDN or content delivery network. These work by storing your website data in a network of caches in different geographical locations. When a user visits your site, your site files are delivered by the cache closest to them, resulting in faster delivery.
I use other Amazon Web Service products. Does CloudFront integrate well with them?
Yes, CloudFront integrates extremely well with other Amazon Web Services.
How much does CloudFront cost?
CloudFront offers a free tier, so you can get started at no cost. New customers receive 50 GB Data Transfer Out and two million HTTP and HTTPS requests a month for the first year. After that, you switch to a pay as you go model. Amazon offers a calculator so you can estimate your costs.
Amazon CloudFront Plans & Prices
CloudFront offers simple pay-as-you-go pricing and you pay only for what you use without minimum commitments or up-front fees. With AWS CloudFront’s free tier you receive 50 GB of data transfer out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests each month for one year. For more information and latest and most up-to-date prices visit CloudFront’s website.
People share their opinions about companies on Twitter each and every day. We monitor tweets about CloudFront and apply a sentiment analysis algorithm that classifies these tweets as positive or negative. Every review is by a real person. We use this information and output an approval rating score, which is based on real people, positive and negative, opinions about Amazon CloudFront on Twitter.
CloudFront Review on Twitter
We monitor tweets about CloudFront and apply sentiment analysis to classify tweets as positive or negative. This allows us to output an approval rating score, which is based on real people, positive and negative, opinions about CloudFront on Twitter. CloudFront approval rating score is 50%. This is based on a total of 2 tweets that mention CloudFront on Twitter. There are 1 mentions that share a positive sentiment and 1 mentions that express a negative sentiment. Find out more about how it works.
CloudFront Rating
50% Score
CloudFront vs Competitor Ratings
All reviews: 2
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Positive: 1
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Negative: 1
Toon Vanagt @Toon
@edarchis One cloud front a day, keeps the down time away 🙂 #AncientDevOpsSaying #devops cc/ @cloudfront https://t.co/sjDOiotbwb
Cass @Casssax
@cloudfront is https://t.co/dDHKYPFRh5 down? "This site can’t be reached
https://t.co/dDHKYPFRh5’s server DNS address could not be found."