Amazon Launches Content Delivery Network

Amazon launched its CloudFront content delivery network today. This is alternative to services such as Akamai at a lower price.

Content delivery networks are a great way to serve up large files such as videos and downloads from your site that might overwhelm your servers or exhaust your bandwidth otherwise. Viral marketing campaign materials are also a great choice for content delivery networks as they can have huge spikes in demand and these services can scale up to handle the demand much easier than your web server. Your files are served up from Amazon's servers instead of your own and you pay for the bandwidth at a rate of 9 to 17 cents per gigabyte.