Why Rackspace Cloud?
We created this page because we've found ourselves constantly running through the pros and cons of physical versus virtual servers and laboring through the benefits and pitfalls of the plethora of no-name virtual hosting providers out there. We now save ourselves and our customers time by pointing them to this page.
As a result of our trials and tribulations over the years, we've come to rely on The Rackspace Cloud for a variety of reasons.
Easy to get started
Amazon EC2 isn't terribly challenging to get running on for a technically savvy and experienced system administrator. However, it's a big stumbling block for the neophyte. Beyond that, even for seasoned administrators, Rackspace Cloud has a very streamlined process for signing up and quickly launching servers. The worst part is a phone verification system before you can launch servers. Other than that, it's a few screens and a credit card and you're ready to launch servers.
Reliable
The Rackspace Cloud has had one well known public outage (which also affected Slicehost). That's fewer than Amazon and certainly fewer than the many fly-by-night VPS providers whose outages would never be known by many. The one Rackspace outage did not affect any of our servers - our oldest server has been running uninterrupted for two years.
Performance
Rackspace Cloud servers are significantly faster than Amazon's EC2 servers and most of the tier 2 VPS providers we've dealt with. You'll notice it as soon as you login to a smaller virtual server (e.g., 512MB). The key difference between Rackspace and Amazon is that Rackspace CPU cycles are minimum guaranteed and Amazon's are maximum. Rackspace servers will also burst if CPU is available on the physical box which, in our experience, it normally is. Further, Rackspace virtual servers have substantially more local disk throughput than EC2 instances. Keep in mind that if you're running tasks that require performance, you must take that into account when pricing out cloud solutions. Otherwise, you'll end up needing more or larger instances to run your solution - which could easily change the apparent pricing advantage between providers.
Images courtesy of The Bitsource. Please read the entire article here.
Persistent
Rackspace Cloud servers (and most other providers) have persistent local disk storage. Amazon EC2 instances traditionally haven't. This meant if your server crashed, or you powered it down, you lost everything on your disk. People came up with sometimes elaborate workarounds by storing , for example, databases on Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) mounted on an EC2 instance. This is a complexity that can be avoided with Rackspace.
Recently, Amazon added the ability to store your system disk in EBS so that it's persistence. This is a great feature and a big step forward for Amazon, but keep in mind you're paying $0.10 per gigabyte month and $0.10 per million I/O requests for EBS storage. See our paragraph at the bottom on 'When not to use Rackspace Cloud'
Great pricing with no contract
Rackspace Cloud pricing beats dedicated server hosting by an astonishing amount. We've come to rarely recommend dedicated hosting unless custom, high-performance, or very large RAM capacity hardware is needed. Every time we've run the price comparison between Rackspace and tier 2 cloud providers, we always end up thinking "Who would pay MORE for a lesser provider?!" After managing large data centers that demand multi-year contracts with complicated pricing schemes for every imagineable item, it's easy to appreciate having no contract and a pricing structure that couldn't be simpler.
Free Backups
Every cloud server up to 80GB in size can store 3 full image backups with the server at no cost. These can be manually initiated or scheduled daily or weekly. This is a great feature for small companies that don't need or can't justify the complexity of a a "real" backup solution. You can also use these backup images to create new servers - a handy feature for bringing up extra web servers quickly. If you need to store more than 3 images, you can move images into Rackspace's CloudFiles storage system where you'll pay $0.15 per gigabyte month for storage.
Good operating system selection
The only operating system we miss when using Rackspace is OpenSolaris. In addition to the common flavors of Linux, they're beta testing Windows Server 2003 and 2008 in both 32 and 64 bit. This means it's openly available for use, but they're not guaranteeing it's perfect quite yet.
SLA and Support
The Rackspace Cloud is backed by Rackspace's Fanatical Support™ for 24x7x365 technical support at no extra cost. With Amazon EC2, you're on your own unless you pay the greater of $400 per month or 20% of your EC2 costs. That means as you scale up, you pay more in support costs even if you're not utilizing support more. For an experienced system administrator, this may matter less as you'll be able to solve most of your own problems. However, for some companies, this can be a substantial advantage.
When not to use the Rackspace Cloud
We haven't yet come up with a reason to choose a no-name / fly-by-night / tier 2 cloud provider. However, there are some reasons why you might want to consider Amazon EC2. The biggest being Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS). With EBS, you can scale your storage infinitely (theoretically) at $0.10 per gigabyte month and $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests. Although Rackspace has CloudFiles, it is not mountable as a disk device so it's far less useful than EBS. With EBS, you could run a 10TB single-instance MySQL database. You can't do that in the Rackspace Cloud. Keep this fact in mind when selecting your virtual server sizes.
Other less important reasons you might consider Amazon mainly revolve around utilizing Amazon's many other services (Auto Scaling, Load Balancing,..), even though many (S3, SQS, ..) can be easily accessed from a cloud server running anywhere. It's worth looking at Amazon's list of services and deciding if hosting with Amazon gives you a strategic advantage you can't duplicate with the Rackspace Cloud. Remember that some of these services (such as load balancing) can be duplicated in any cloud, but involve more effort and/or a third party solution.
Conclusion
We hope this page has helped you with your choice of cloud providers. We have recently become Rackspace affiliates and would appreciate your using our affiliate link if you do sign up with Rackspace. It costs you nothing, and we earn a small percentage to offset our own hosting fees.
