With a little bit of persuasion by the YSlow plugin for FireBug I took the plunge and decided to try out SimpleCDN.com with the 15 free credits.
Although I use nearly very few images on my website, having an alternate server local to the user should speed things up even more and integrating AutoCDN with your site is just a matter of prefixing your links.
Considering most of my images are under 1kb each, and the stylesheet is a meager 11k, it would allow me 150 similar items to be hosted which fall in the under 100kb category in their pricing structure. With free updates to existing files of the same size it's a win-win situation; I presume the updates are free as long as they don't go into the next pricing category which leaves you some leeway for small differences in size.
World Coverage
With SimpleCDN being a relatively new startup and no concrete information on their website about their I can only presume they are US centric at the moment, based on traceroutes from the UK, USA, Australia and India they are peering with resisoft.com which has some pretty good links with HE, Teleglobe, GlobalCrossing and all the other usual suspects.
This is a disadvantage compared to other CDN services which provide truly global distribution with local bandwidth in Europe or even bandwidth starved countries that matter like Australia.
Account Management
All I can say is the management interface is painful to use, iframes within iframes and multiple scrolling areas on the page at any time (often within each other) makes it very distracting to find the information you need; on top of this it's very very AJAX heavy.
Not to mention the whole management interface is designed for a widescreen display at presumably 1440 pixels or wider, so those of us using only 1280x1024 have to scroll around and are greeted with an strange page that's only half there or where the menu consumes more than a third of the screen space available.
The final result (even at full screen) is a user interface which I need to scroll around to get basic things done, with page tearing at slow frame rates.
Conclusion
While it's extremely cheap for small images such as avatars, CSS stylesheets, Javascript or other small files with very reasonable pricing for larger files if you just need to offload bandwidth and static files, the lack of global coverage and poor web admin interface equate it to being a feature-rich scalable file hosting service trying to play with the big boys.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of cool features, but my original aims were to find a global content distribution service, so with the low price you'll have to compromise.
Hello and thanks for taking a look at SimpleCDN. We launched our services a little over two months ago, and are rapidly expanding our serving locations this summer. By the end of the summer we'll have 20 state-side locations, and 10 international locations. We've also been listening to user feedback, and will introduce a full API, as well as a re-designed management interface! :-) At least with the AutoCDN and MirrorCDN services you don't have to visit the manager that often ;-).
Again, thanks for the review, and we look forward to you taking a fresh look at us in a few months. Our goal is to provide global CDN services at a price everyone can afford and understand. We're listening to your comments, and I promise changes and enhancements are on the way!
Have a great summer.
Thanks,
Frank Wilson
SimpleCDN Chief Engineer