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Comment by maratd | Hacker News Reader

> For now, EC2 is a far superior compute platform in just about every way.

Not quite. You will get far better IO on Rackspace. Also, you get more CPU bang for you buck. Not all of us need anything beyond a highly performant VPS.

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Linode is a much better choice for VPS. Rackspace cloud currently runs entirely on old AMD 2374 hardware. Sure you get 4 burstable cores for all instance types, but these do not perform even close to as well as 4 core on Intel 55xx or 56xx hardware many other cloud providers utilize. Disk IO may be better with Rackspace on th low end (e.g. Compared to M1.small), but it doesn't scale, and you'll be getting the same IO on a 16GB instance, which doesn't even come close to an m2 or cc instance with EC2.

> Linode is a much better choice for VPS.

Except they don't offer a 256MB RAM option. Rackspace does, for $10 a month. The only other serious competitor in this space is the EC2 micro and well, it doesn't perform as well.

> Also, you get more CPU bang for your buck.

I'm not sure this is necessarily true. We did a recent study and found RAX costs almost double for our example web app: http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-c...

Did you run any actual tests? I recently needed to crunch a big bunch of numbers and, instead of simply comparing specs, I actually benchmarked various EC2 and rackspace configurations to find actual calculations per $. The end result was that using Rackspace (4GB instance) would end up about 30% cheaper than EC2 for my particular work load.

Good point, we didn't actually run the tests. We're planning on expanding our focus beyond just cost to include performance and features of the clouds as well.

Be careful with that on rackspace. If I recall correctly, they use a credit scheduler with burst capacity. You need to be sure that you're not just getting a bunch of burst capacity and factoring that in with your cost calcs.

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