Ask HN: Rackspace versus EC2, is it worth it for support? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rackspace versus EC2, is it worth it for support?

8 pointsjwwest11 comments

I'm a big EC2 fan. It's incredibly inexpensive and being somewhat comfortable with the command line, it's a good fit for small projects.

A friend of mine is launching a new product and chose Rackspace for the support options they offer. He's not a server guy, and to him having someone available to help fix or scale his servers is worth the little extra he pays.

I have zero experience in load balancing and scaling. My question is: how hard is to learn or at least muddle through if I expect rapid growth? Or is it worth it to have support on hand if I need it?

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I've tested both Rackspace Cloud Servers and Amazon EC2, and am currently using Rackspace Cloud Servers in production for my site. There are a number of factors that influenced this decision: - Support is definitely a factor. I've found the support reps at Rackspace to be really helpful, and in cases, depending who you speak to there, they sometimes go above the call of duty. I had a rep help me setup configure haproxy for load balancing while on their standard support (not managed). - I've found setup to be simpler. I feel this is an entirely subjective area, but in setting up a new server, I typically just want a clean Ubuntu box. Having community made instances are nice, but not something I need or use, so selecting an AMI just seems to make it more confusing.

Overall, I'd say it's very much based on what you're doing. My site is quite simple, so the additional services Amazon offers just complicate the setup, and Rackspace wins in ease of use. If you're startup requires high amounts of memory, cpu or disk space, then Amazon's the winner. I've found scaling Rackspace also to be a lot simpler. When my site's been featured on Mashable, Fast Company, GigaOm, etc., in a couple clicks (even from my iPhone), I can scale to a bigger box.

I'm guessing my application will probably require lots of memory. I plan on eventually implementing memcached because of the number of database reads that I will require.

Here's my 2 cents for what is worth. I have managed several large scale installations at Rackspace, and I have to say that there is a huge disparity between their advertised support, and the quality of support you actually get. I was constantly unimpressed with the overall knowledge of their staff, and had numerous issues with them doing maintenance at the wrong time on our servers. For instance I would open a ticket saying to do it at 2AM PST, and notice that 2PM that day my server is being restarted by some incompetent sysadmin.

In all honesty I wouldn't trust Rackspace to host any of my servers anymore, and would either colo something somewhere else, use MediaTemple, or continue using EC2.

I've been a Rackspace customer on and off for about six years. In that time, I've definitely seen a drop in the overall quality of support. Their managed mail product is less much mature than Noteworthy used to be (it blows my mind that I have to submit support tickets to cancel mailboxes), and it's a roll of the dice every time I submit a support ticket. Still, I made a six-month detour to another 'premium' provider last year, and that was an absolute nightmare. I had something like thirty hours of downtime with this other host, and that experience was enough to send me back to Rackspace.

In my experience, it is usually possible to get through periods of rapid growth without pre-existing support or knowledge. Sometimes you learn fast enough to manage on your own; sometimes you have to bring in experts after-the-fact, and pay through the nose. But there's no rule that says you need to ask for help now. If you want to "muddle through", you will probably manage.

Paradoxically, technology companies are rarely killed by a lack of technical know-how.

That said, there's also no shame in having support in place. If you already know that high scalability is not your core competency, and if you aren't intensely interested in making it be, having pre-existing support can be very helpful. I don't know how good Rackspace support is in particular, but I've often had very helpful conversations and planning sessions with support (mostly ISVs). Not to mention, it may be more cost-effective to consult them now than try to put out the fire later.

After reading the other comments and yours, it looks like it might be better not to worry too much up front about "what ifs", especially considering that I'm technical and could learn on the fly if needed.

probably not the answer you're looking for but I've been very happy since moving to MediaTemple

24 hour support and they've been able to help me every single time I've called them.

Their GridService scales with traffic bursts so you don't have to worry about a whole lot. My site was featured on Mashable and brought in about 12K hits in a few hours and it handled it just fine.

Interesting. I was under the impression that MediaTemple was only for web hosting.

You can run anything you want on their VPSes, just like any other VPS provider.

I feel like MT has gone downhill in the last year or so. Support used to answer my tickets in 15-30 minutes, whereas recent ones for my remaining dedicated server with them have taken 4-48 hours.

I much prefer the full-system control I have with Slicehost or EC2.

I used to use RimuHosting before I switched totally over to AWS because that is what customers wanted to use, so I wanted to be on the same platform for my own projects.

RimuHosting always provided very good support, and I think that they are much less expensive than Rackspace, so you might want to check them out.

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