Using Amazon’s Cloudfront to host static files

The major players online use CDNs–Content Delivery Networks–to serve their static files, such as images, CSS and javascript files.  CDNs have edge locations scattered around the world, so that when a user in Japan (for example) visits your page, he’ll be served all the static content from a server in Tokyo, even though your main web server may be located in the US.

In recent years, a number of CDNs have emerged that can affordably serve content for web sites that don’t have million dollar budgets.  Amazon’s Cloudfront service is probably the cheapest, most accessible such CDN. Read more