If you need a CDN you most likely can afford to pay for one. No? I mean even if you're just loading your images through S3 unless you're getting some crazy num

If you need a CDN you most likely can afford to pay for one. No? I mean even if you're just loading your images through S3 unless you're getting some crazy number of hits it's only going to cost you a few bucks a month. I'm all for CDNs however many people think that you need it (thanks to yslow and google) for a basic website and it's just not the case. if you're not under a high traffic situation that extra hop can actually make your site slower than if you just served the files from your server. If you're on a php/database driven site (early on) I would be willing to wager that your optimization time would be better spent following that string. If your website can only handle 25 hit/s because you're killing MySQL with SELECT* FROM ALL type commands the CDN is not going to do you much good. After you're sure your code is optimized and you feel you need it, sure have at it! there are plenty of good CDNs out there.