Amazon CloudFront vs phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud Comparison

A

Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud does not)
• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $39/mo
• Higher Analytics score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 7/10)

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Why choose phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud

• Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Support score (7/10 vs 6/10)
• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

A

Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

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phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud

Pros

• Servers can be deployed in minutes through the web portal, the REST API, the pnapctl CLI, or Terraform, according to vendor pages and ServeTheHome's hands-on test.
• Hourly billing lets you tear servers down at any time, and reservations cut costs by up to 30 percent.
• A broad catalog includes Xeon 6, ARM, GPU, and Pliops database instances.
• A first deployment includes 15 TB of bandwidth, which servers in the same location can share.
• The portal gives direct iKVM console access for recovering servers that stop responding.

Cons

• Servers are unmanaged by default, so you handle the OS, patches, and security.
• Only six locations are listed, fewer than at the large hyperscalers.
• Pricing is higher than at budget dedicated hosts, because you pay for the automation layer.
• There are few user reviews on G2 and similar sites, and one user reported that billing setup took several attempts.
• No SLA terms were found for Bare Metal Cloud. Third-party listings cite both a 100 percent and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.