The Real Cost of Amazon CloudFront

Amazon introduced web service for content delivery, called Amazon CloudFront yesterday. CloudFront is thought to be a bring a pricing war between the current CDN providers.

If you do a little bit calculations for the real cost of the CDN, it turns out that it is much higher than the advertised pricing, for smaller files.

Following is the effective cost per GB for USA locations for CloudBurst. For example - if your files are 5KB in size, you will actually pay $0.3797 per GB not $0.17 . If your file size is 10MB, then you will pay the advertised price of $0.17 per GB. So, essentially if you are distributing images or movies, CloudFront will be cost effective, however if you are distributing JavaScripts of small size, you may be paying a lot more.

File Size (KB)	Effective Cost per GB
5KB	$0.3797 (123% more)
10KB	$0.2749
20KB	$0.2224
50KB	$0.1910
100KB	$0.1805
500KB	$0.1721
1MB	$0.1710
5MB	$0.1702
10MB	$0.1701
100MB	$0.1700
1GB	$0.1700

Here is how I calculated this - for US locations, data transfer rate (for first 10 TB / month) is $0.17 and request rate is $0.01 per 10,000 requests.
Effective cost per GB = $0.17+(1024*1024/file_size * 0.01/10000);