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Comment by jwegan | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace's primary business is dedicated hosting. In fact they let you have both dedicated hosts and cloud hosts and allow dedicated and cloud hosts to talk to each other.

I'm curious why they didn't just switch to Rackspace's dedicated hosting. It would have given them the performance they needed while retaining the flexibility of being able to quickly spin up cloud machines in the same datacenter as the dedicated machines.

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> In fact they let you have both dedicated hosts and cloud hosts and allow dedicated and cloud hosts to talk to each other.

That's not amazing at all.

You do realise that a "cloud" host and a dedicated box are two exact same hardware boxes siting next to each other in a rack? One's just virtualized 10x with Xen, VMWare, KVN, etc.

Of course its not amazing, but it is a feature they have that would have made the transition to dedicated easier.

Being networked is a feature?

Being in the same datacenter is a feature since it means there is extremely low latency between your dedicated and cloud machines. Sub-millisecond vs. 10s of milliseconds round trip times can make a huge difference.

You're wrong about that. The big hosting providers do not put public cloud hardware next to dedicated hardware. Public cloud hardware goes in big, homogenous racks in a specific area of the datacenter. Dedicated hardware is very mix-and-match; you have all sorts of servers and network devices racked together. Connecting the two environments is no small feat, given the VLAN limitations of most current switches.

Who said it was amazing? And I highly doubt that virtual and dedicated are the same boxes sitting next to each other (or even near each other).

Rackspace is very expensive... almost 2x their competitors. At work we left rackspace recently, because we needed to upgrade our server and it was going to jump up to $1200! a month. Plus we found out that we were running on two year old discontinued hardware. Although we still had a SLA that didn't apply to hardware failures, which would be fixed on a 'best effort' basis and could mean a days-long outage. We moved (to the cloud ironically) and got a huge performance increase, for half the price (and that includes paying a company to monitor/manage it for us).

If I have to guess, I would guess cost is too high to have rackspace managed dedicated server. I've been working with rackspace's managed dedicated for 10 years. They are pricey but for a small shop where you dont have dedicated network/hardware guy. It's worth every penny. 99% I called their fanatic support, I hear human voice after 1 ring.

Now their cloud support is different story.

because Rackspace is very expensive. They are awesome, but they are expensive on the dedicated side.

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