Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean this insensitively; why would I choose rackspace over aws/goog?

If you don't want to be a sysadmin.

I don't have services like Pingdom or Pager Duty for my sites. I have Rackspace. If a site goes down, they immediately attempt to recover it, acting within the account rules I set up with them. If that fails, I get a phone call from an expert and we troubleshoot together.

I once got a call that one of my servers had started sending out a high volume of email. When I took the call, Rackspace folks had already found the nasty script doing it and just needed my ok to take the site down for a few minutes to boot it.

The service is really great. But, it ends just below the application layer, and these days, that's where most of the problems show up. So I am looking at moving off of Rackspace, but I'm looking up the service ladder at application-aware hosting services like WP Engine or Pantheon. As opposed to down the service ladder, to a self-service "don't call us" system like AWS or Google.

Fantastic reply - thank you

Coming from a previous Rackspace customer (over 10 years), I wouldn't at this point. AWS cloud offerings are superior to Rackspace cloud and LiquidWeb dedicated servers are much more cost effective with decent support.

Their support used to be the best in the business and we were willing to pay a premium for that but even their support started to suffer starting early 2015.

It is unfortunate because Rackspace was an amazing partner to our business for a long-time, which made it a very hard choice when we decided to move on.

I was there years ago but the main reason was support. I worked on the Enterprise/Custom (largest clients, minimum 5 figure MRR/month) team and the phones were staffed by actual System Engineers/Admins 24/7. It might be one guy overnight but if you were the CTO of $bigname and needed something done, from SQL restores, migrations, etc all you had to do was dial in. No phone tag, no wait, no voicemails.

We were very expensive but the companies must have saved money in hiring their own Engineers as were always growing.

AWS/GCP/Azure have made doing a lot of what we used to do incredibly more accessible to more people.

You don't. I just moved a WP multisite from Rackspace Cloud to AWS. Load times down 50%. Cost down 90%. Hosting is not, and has never been, an easy business.

That seems off. It's been 2 or so years now, but I worked for a company that had a five digit monthly bill from both Rackspace and AWS, and our costs to migrate from one to the other were within 15% when we did the math.

90% seems way off. AWS is known for not being cheap (neither is Rackspace), but I highly doubt that Rackspace was ten times the price of Amazon.

Refactor code to handle spot loss and then go with much larger spot instances??

I could see that true. I forgot that my (now ex-) employer was for whatever reasons averse to reserved, let alone spots.

To clarify, in all liklihood - you would be doing top tier on spot, and then 2nd and third via other methods... but there are ways to get a system to really handle spot loss...

There are MANY applications that simply are too complex to handle such an arch... so, - do so, when you can, but know when that's just stupid.... stacks are like snowflakes, we LOVE them to death, or we love them to DEATH...

Uh, AWS is absolutely known for being cheap. I'm in the hosting business as well and our AWS offerings are a fraction of the cost of other solutions, especially when you consider what you get.

>Uh, AWS is absolutely known for being cheap.

Not if you need always-on instances.

Agreed. Digital ocean and other hosts are better for always-on instances, though some of the T2 instances with burst credits are decent on AWS.

Support. Rackspace knows hardware and Linux like few others. Very few.

With AWS/Google, you don't have to worry about hardware and OS, that's the entire point of the cloud. You are more focused on your apps, of course it costs a bit more, but hopefully you save it by not having to deal with hardware or OS issues.

Sure, there's Lambda but if you need EC2 then you do need to worry about the OS. And while you do not need to worry about the hardware breaking down, that's the same when you are renting a physical or a virtual server because you need to build a redundant infra anyways and whether the fallen node comes back in an hour or you can spin it up yourself is of little consequence. And you still need to understand your hardware if you want performance.

If your talking about ec2 instances, its really the hardware and physical networking you don't have to worry about. You manage the virtual networking, hosts, etc.

colocation

customer support

@devopsproject I don't think users/companies value colo & support ^until^ bad things happen and the costs of not running critical business are evident.

Sort of off topic, but can confirm. I've had issues with GCP where site is down and it's taken 1+ days to hear back from someone.

Maybe there was a way to escalate it, but it wasn't readily evident. Which tells you something. So, I just moved on to AWS. More transparency on the platform and more predictable support.

> So, I just moved on to AWS. More transparency on the platform and more predictable support.

Bad news. AWS is no different. EC2, IAM, whatever will have issues for hours, AWS won't update their status board (to the point someone wrote an extension to show the "real" status [1]), etc. And this is with business support we pay for. You needed to autoscale? Better go make yourself a mojito and wait for the dust to settle.

"There is no cloud, its just someone else's computer" [2]

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/real-aws-status/ka...

[2] http://i.imgur.com/i9e6143.png

It's funny how people lose sight of what the 'cloud' really is. Abstractions can be self defeating in some instances.

"I've had issues with GCP where site is down and it's taken 1+ days to hear back from someone. Maybe there was a way to escalate it, but it wasn't readily evident."

In the end someone has a pager, a machine and an editor. In ye-old-days this problem was in-house with a COLO machine. That's the reasoning behind uptime. 99%/year is 361 and just over half a day. Can you loose two and a half days at christmas? (web commerce) or the same time on a new product release? (SaaS) or 2.5 days development time at a critical bug fix with your customers?

The bad stuff always happens at the worst time. The market is saying, ^cloud^ but the tradeoff is ^service^. I don't know the answer(s).

Seems obvious: cloud computers with great support

but such a product would be expensive

yes it is obvious, "cloud computers with great support".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com