You miss the point; bandwidth from a single source != CDN. Hosting without a CDN would be extremely slow for people that were far (hops) away from DO. CDN's solve this, and other issues.
How much does that really matter? Even going to the otherside of the world is only 200ms or so, and the time taken to run rubygems is hardly a factor in just about any workflow I can imagine.
Think of it another way - what would be more valuble - RubyGems hosted on CDN, or RubyGems on DO and give a couple of grants for talent hackers to work on their gems fulltime for a few months. (ala GSoC)
Even if you ARE concerned about latency, have one download server in the US (E.g. DO), one in Europe (e.g. Hetzner) and one in SE Asia (Not sure who's cheap and good-ish there), and you'd still be a 1/4 the cost of AWS bandwidth or less.
Person who pays the bill here. Latency does matter and we're paying an additional $1.5k new in Feb to improve european latency. RubyCentral can afford to spend the money to improve latency issues, so we do!
Really, why would that be the case? I mean the difference in Latency.
A self set up Linode CDN with all six location
Tokyo, JP
London, UK
Newark, NJ
Atlanta, GA
Dallas, TX
Fremont, CA
Would have provided 48TB of Pooled bandwidth at a very decent speed and cost around $480. Linode's Network are great, much better then DO. I am not sure if it match CloudFront, which isn't exactly the fastest CDN anyway.
I have 10 fingers, so that is definitely not "countless" hours of work. And No, Maintenance are minimal or non existent. You could even get smaller VPS behind each node balancer as HA. Since Linode VPS ( Unlike DO ) are deployed on physically different hardware.
While i say it is fair enough to use AWS because money doesn't matter, i thought there are definitely some better alternative for the same price( if you really cared about latency ) or cheaper options.
That's been my impression so far with repositories where you configure a mirror explicitly, like Debian or CPAN. I used to be diligent about doing "the right thing" and switching out the default (usually something in the U.S.) for a Danish or nearby mirror. But I've stopped caring much because it doesn't really seem to make any perceptible difference. If I remember to, I still will switch it just so I don't unnecessarily waste intercontinental infrastructure, but it doesn't make much difference to my own experience.
