Studiopress have introduced a new CDN like service called Studiopress Accelerator for WordPress blogs, On first glance I thought it as a some sort of premium caching plugin but when explored more I found that its more like a integrated CDN and DNS service.
They call it as “A highly efficient, full-page caching solution that is built on high-end hardware featuring SSD drives and smart, event-driven software that is designed with full-page caching in mind.”. We have seen many WordPress only services in last few years like Managed WordPress hosting but this seems to be something new from the surface but at the core seems more like a sub feature that many managed WordPress hosting providers already provides.
Though I haven’t tried it yet but I am not sold out by the technical insight they gave, There were mention about SSD disks and specially designed softwares but that doesn’t satisfy someone who is technically inclined. For example this blog hosted on Digital Ocean SSD disks but costs are much lesser than what studiopress quoted in their pricing page.
I don’t want to spark a debate by dismissing their product blindly but a bit more insights about their technology may convince more users. Also I don’t see any distinctions between them and other CDN providers like Amazon AWS other than calling it as a WordPress only service.
I did a quick monthly price calculation for Amazon AWS S3 cloud storage, Cloud front (CDN service) and Route 53 (Premium DNS service) and surprisingly the cost was way less than ($7) the StudioPress Accelerator ($10). The calculation was for blog which gets about 5 Million monthly GET requests and 5GB of outgoing bandwidth and the cost is based on your traffic and I think that makes more sense than the flat monthly fee. I feel AWS setup will prove to be much faster and reliable than the StudioPress Accelerator but again I know its too early to call it off, Need to come up with some solid stats to backup my views.