As an Indie developer, the most important asset you have is the Zip or DMG files that contain your product. These downloads are what make or break your business. It is important to ensure that those bits are delivered reliably and quickly to each customer.
Previously I was hosting the downloads on my Web hosting account at NearlyFreeSpeech. I never ran into any downtime issues with my NearlyFreeSpeech account, but the negatives should be fairly obvious.
- If your Web server does indeed go down, your downloads probably won’t be available on third-party sites like Apple Downloads or MacUpdate either.
- Depending on the popularity of your application and binary size, bandwidth could become expensive.
As part of improving Second Gear’s Web experience, I decided to move my downloads offsite to a dedicated content delivery network (CDN). A CDN has the benefit of having servers all around the world and dynamically shifting customers to servers closest to them to offer an optimal, speedy download experience for all.
I looked at a variety of different CDN solutions, but the two best I found were Amazon CloudFront and SimpleCDN. For the basic needs of Second Gear, both CloudFront and SimpleCDN had negligible differences in terms of pricing and performance.
In the end, I chose SimpleCDN because I preferred their administration panel and reporting mechanisms. SimpleCDN breaks down downloads on a per-file basis, which lets me track how often Check Off and Today are being download each day, week or month. If you are already using Amazon S3, you may find CloudFront a better choice. I’ve been on SimpleCDN for a few months now and it’s barely broken a sweat, though my downloads are three times faster than before. Don’t believe me? Give it a shot.
