It irks me that every time AWS comes up people compare the pricing with simple VPS providers that only sell virtual machines and a few bells and whistles.
For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it. Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial footnote.
Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the butcher than it is at a restaurant.
It seems like a bad strategic decision to try to build a CDN on top of a platform that already offers a CDN while expecting to be cheaper than their economy-of-scale-driven CDN.
Not to say that you couldn't build a CDN on AWS, but if you're going to do it, wanting to do it for cheaper than someone who doesn't pay markup on the same instances (Amazon) isn't realistic.
For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it. Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial footnote.
Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the butcher than it is at a restaurant.