Re:Ask HN: Can you recommend a Cloud host to us?
by byoung2 on Saturday October 10, 2009 @05:54PM
(#873912)
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.
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.