I use all of Rackspace Cloud's offerings (Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers, Cloud Files) and I've been satisfied so far. I also use GoGrid for more advanced applications, as they offer free hardware load balancing and mountable cloud storage.

I'm assuming you're interested in Cloud Servers vs Amazon EC2? Depending on your usage (mainly bandwidth in/out), one or the other may work out slightly cheaper, but for the most part they are about the same price (although with Rackspace, support is free and very good). A huge advantage to Rackspace is that the instances can be resized on the fly, and they allow bursting.

For example, a 2GB Cloud Server (based on server RAM) is 1/8th of a quad core 2.4GHz server, but that is a CPU floor, meaning that 1/8th of the server's resources are guaranteed, but if you have a brief spike and there are sufficient resources on the host, you can burst to 100% of 4 cores. With EC2, you can never go above the allotted resources.

As far as outages go, Rackspace had some bad luck with their DFW datacenter this year, but I wasn't affected. The SAT datacenter seems to be more stable.

The answer is - "It depends", on a lot of parameters like: 1. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do? 2. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time. 3. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it? 4. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more? 5. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often? 6. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-files(rackspace)? Many more ....

So I think if you describe you requirements and budget better, the suggestions provided will be better.

About problems like low speed, outages, etc. Yes both have their own set of problems, but still a more relevant answer can be given when you have illustrated you requirements.

I have been using EC2,S3,SDB for one of my projects(last 4 months) and Rackspace/Mosso cloudserver for another (last 3 months). Since the durations are short I may not be able to explain everything, but will try my best. :-)

We will be looking for a cloud server that we can self administrate, vs. a cloud site that the host administrates. The budget will be what it has to be to get what we want and need.

1. Q. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do?

A. Virtual on a shared box will do right now.

2. Q. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time.

A. Currently we are still in development, so these are still to be determined. Part of our service will be serving video content.

3. Q. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it?

A. Yes, we will need to mod apache and harden the OS.

4. Q. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more?

A. Cash flow currently dictates monthly.

5. Q. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often?

A. “Computational Nodes” as far a grid hosting no. I’m not a cloud expert but if it is handled by the scalability of the cloud probably. How often would still need to be determined.

6. Q. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-files(rackspace)?

A. Yes, probably except for SQS.

Just a note: We are leaning towards RackSpace because of their connection with LimeLight because of Limelight’s focus on video delivery to the end user.

Most of you requirements except the need for SDB and S3 are well satisfied by Rackspace. Rackspace is also coming up with a new feature, similar to S3 called cloud files. But no equivalent for SDB.

Since you are in development Rackspace's low end boxes (like 256M with 512 bursts, etc.)charged nominally for bandwidth will do fine. Whereas Amazon has got fixed boxes with 2G or something as far as I remember, I took it like 5 months ago. For a dev box where there is no/not-much user traffic, a low end shared box from Rackspace if a good option. Its highly efficient on the budget. Once you have used it for dev phase you will have more knowledge and confidence on what Rackspace can do and what not. So you can decide whether to use it for prod or move over to something else.

Rackspace has got a monthly billing and anytime cancelling option. It works fine on budget as well as it gives you control over things if they are going beyond what you initially thought, as you can see the usage in real time (may be a few hours late at max). They had a money back policy too, about 4 months ago when I signed up, for the first month if the user is not satisfied.

About problems:

EC2: very less problems. But remember these are commodity hardware, measly boxes, the moment you start too many process (if doing any mutli processing) the box's response time mounts exponentially :-). Multi-threaded is fine.

S3 - have been using for storing images and haven't had a problem so far. You have options to save your EC2 image to your S3 space regularly to keep backup server images. That costs you in terms of the space required on S3.

SDB: I hope you are aware but will still iterate that this is a key-value datastore, not relational. I will say it is very much in the works. It does a lot good at most of the times, but lack of a group-by, only text data, only lexicographic sort (which forces the user to put even numerical data in special formats to sort on it), a bit ill defined mutli-valued attributes, number of attributes allowed to put at each request and overall number of attributes for a item are a few bumps in the road. But once you read the docs and be regular with the AWS forums most of these get solved.

Rackspace cloud server: Only problem I have faced SSH is slow sometimes.

Rackspace cloudfiles: haven't used. But I know that you can automate your cloud server backup to cloud files, that costs.

Again, as you mentioned LimeLight, that's another factor, that makes Rackspace more suitable for you.

So I guess you best bet is to start off with Rackspace for now and see how it goes.

Hope that answer helps.

One thing to consider is that rackspace doesn't seem to have an EBS (elastic block storage) equivalent. You can not mount any of their NAS offerings to a cloud server.

This means a few things:

  1. Your cloud servers top out at 620G storage per 
     instance.

  2. You can not scale the storage separately from RAM/CPU.
     To get more storage you have to buy the more expensive
     instance types, even if you don't need the additional
     RAM/CPU.
 
  3. You can not increase throughput nor reliability by 
     doing a soft-raid over multiple mounted storage 
     devices.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, this is the last info I got from rackspace.

True, but the reason Amazon created EBS is that on EC2 local instance storage is transient, so they needed something nonvolatile but lower-level than S3. Cloud Server's local storage is already nonvolatile and RAID-1'd.

/works for Rackspace

Well, I really like Rackspace and would love to find an excuse to use them - but this statement comes across as weaseling. :-)

What does it matter why amazon introduced EBS here? It doesn't. What matters is that this is a serious constraint on the Rackspace side.

You brought this up, so I'll take the chance to add that I really don't like the way you spin this on your comparison page (under Bullet 01, no less):

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...

Is Rackspace turning a Marketing-Company now?

A fair comparison would include EBS and the associated costs. EBS is an integral part of the EC2 offering, just like your NAS options are an... Oh wait, those don't work with your CloudServers.

The apple-to-oranges FUD you have there right now only leaves a bad taste in the mouth of an educated, potential customer. Smoke & mirror tactics like that are a big red flag ("Are they so insecure about their offering?").

> What does it matter why amazon introduced EBS here? It doesn't.

Sure it does, because the reason is precisely that EBS is the only option for non-volatile storage in the Amazon cloud. This comes free for nonvolatile storage comes free with every Cloud Servers vm, up to the limits you mentioned, instead of having to pay extra for EBS to get that feature.

All I was saying was this is a fine tradeoff for most users. No need to get defensive. :)

No idea how my statement could come across as defensive - the intention was rather offensive. And I must say I'm quite disappointed by the response.

Sorry if I acome across like an angry nerd by now but a) that's what I am and b) do you really think this is a good forum to play the smoke & mirrors game in?

Many of us over here build systems like the ones you are selling. False claims like "rackspace is giving their storage away for free" simply don't work for us.

I feel insulted when reading bollocks like that. Why do you try to treat me like an idiot?

The rackspace storage does ofcourse not come "free". The cost was simply factored into the base-fee.

Let's compare the largest instance where we can make a match, shall we:

   Monthly fee |  Rackspace 8G Instance | EC2 "Large"
  -------------+------------------------+-----------------
  Monthly Fee  |                $345.60 |         $288.00 
  640G Disk    |                $0.00   |          $64.00
  =============^========================+================
                                $345.60 |         $352.00

Rackspace comes out ahead by a lousy $6.40 or 2%. That's your definition of free, yes?

Want me to make that comparison with a reserved instance? Ah, thanks for asking, I knew you wanted.

   Monthly fee |  Rackspace 8G Instance | "Large" reserved
  -------------+------------------------+-----------------
  Monthly Fee  |                $345.60 |         $162.00 
  640G Disk    |                $0.00   |          $64.00
  =============^========================+================
                                $345.60 |         $226.00

Oops. By the means of a simple 1 year commitment EC2 suddenly comes out ahead quite a worthwhile $119.60 or 35%.

And know what, one great thing we could use these $120 saved bucks for would be to add 1.2T more storage! How's that? And what would the price for that be at rackspace anyways? Oh sorry, I forget, 640G ought to be enough for everybody...

Well, I'll stop already, you see where it's headed. :-)

For your own good, please refrain from bending facts the way you did above when speaking to a technical audience. Unless having nerds like me pop out of the wood and redact you in public is part of your marketing strategy...

I've used and had good experience with both platforms. The only performance issues I've ever had were with SimpleDB when it was in beta.

For support the nod would have to go to Rackspace, in my opinion. The two times I've needed help I was talking to a real person in San Antonio within twenty seconds or so, which beats a post in the AWS forums that might eventually get answered from an employee if your lucky.

Here's what I'm doing at the moment:

Slicehost for web server, backend processing and db. This allows me to scale each major part individually. The processor agents store a bunch of stuff on S3.

I'm probably going to change this to using the backend systems on Slicehost just as schedulers and do the actual processing on EC2. The biggest concern here is transferring the data back and forth. If Amazon provided functionality identical to Slicehost at the same economics, I would switch in an instant.

Does anyone have any experiences with Rackspace Cloud Sites? Is it a good way to get scalable hosting without worrying about provisioning new instances and such?

Customer Support is good. Functionality is pretty meh. You have no SSH, no SCP, no gzip.

We host on EC2 and it's been really cost effective, and everything that we've needed EXCEPT multiple IPs to an instance. each instance can only have one IP, and therefore one SSL certificate (until.....SSL tech in browsers catches up with standards, and TLS is fully adopted in browsers and apache)

This is indeed a problem. The only solutions I've found are to use a wild card certificate if you just need to secure subdomains, or to use a SANS UCC certificate that allows multiple entries into the Subject Alternative Name (not perfect due to cost and the need to reissue the cert every time you add a domain).

Have you found any other workarounds to this problem?

I haven't. Right now, we're trying to figure it out. We work with many FQDNs. I've been talking to a local guy who says that in bulk I could get IPs for $3/mo at his datacenter. The price is good, but I'm then back to managing hardware, which I don't really want to do.

I use Cloud Sites as well, and it is great for small "code it and load it" projects such as proof of concept sites, or blogs. No SSH or SCP makes version control and deployment tricky.

As a LAMP-only guy, I haven't used this feature, but you can run Linux and Windows from the same directory, which is pretty cool.

Had cloud sites when it was Mosso (they renamed it if I'm not mistaken). Performance and options were weak IMO. Sites seemed fairly slow.

We ended up sticking with dedicateds from Rackspace for site hosting. Performance and support are superb.

I've had pretty bad experiences with Mosso's technical staff as well. I don't know if that's changed with the changeover to being the "Rackspace Cloud" or not though.

No experience with Cloud Sites (only Cloud Servers) but I can say that their customer support really is pretty darn good.

I use Linode for my sites and haven't had any problems. I've heard that Slicehost has a better control panel (Linode has practically nothing apart from allowing you to provision your resources), but I didn't really need those. I just needed a VPS with root access that wouldn't break the bank, and Linode fit the bill.

I haven't used Amazon myself, but a good friend of mine has done quite a bit with it. When I asked him about it, he said (IIRC) that one thing to be aware of what that you couldn't run a MySQL DB on one of their small instances--you needed a large instance. So, something to keep in mind.

(Please do verify this--I may have misremembered or the facts may have changed since I heard this.)

So that I know how to improve my comments in the future, why was this downvoted?

It's an important thing to know, and I admitted up front that it was second-hand knowledge with some uncertainty about it. Was the issue the second-hand knowledge, the lack of complete certainty, or what?

I recently switched to Slicehost. For me, it's exactly what I want. A flat monthly fee for a server instance and easily upgradable as needed. They provide a choice of Linux systems, and from there you're free to build as you see fit. They offer reverse dns, which is vital for running mail servers and not available on Amazon( last I checked. )