Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawnps | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I work at Rackspace. If you don't mind me asking, what makes you initially want to move away?

Funny to post this here, but I'm actually planning on migrating from Rackspace to AWS purely because of price.

Rackspace's prices are insane. $1,314/mo for a cloud server with 30gb of ram, compared to $657/mo for 34gb on AWS.

Plus with AWS you can use reserved instances to get that cost down to $286/mo. Rackspace has no way to get the cost down.

That makes Rackspace cost over 4.5x more when comparing based on ram.

If you're that price sensitive/need big RAM and can use RIs you should really be looking at dedicated servers, too. (for which Rackspace is expensive as well, but actually provides a service level to justify it in many cases)

I disagree. The markup does not simply justify cheery service folks. I want knowledgeable. When they don't have support for Nginx, to me, that's not knowledgeable.

Rackspace prices are insanely high and I can't wait to move off of them.

I'm ok with a dedicated server provider being good at the physical and network without much focus on applications on the host. You can use a third party for host level sysadmin, but you don't have a third party choice for the infrastructure.

For the cost that Rackspace charges (and what they claim to provide for said cost) I want both.

That's a crazy amount to be paying a month for under $500 worth of RAM (2 x 16GB DDR3-1600 registered ECC for example). As the other reply mentioned, you should look into dedicated servers or colocation if you don't mind dealing with hardware yourself.

Interesting, are you using any cloud management platform (e.g. RightScale)? They'll make it simpler to migrate.

If you're scenario is more complicated than a single server, you might find our tool useful to forecast your costs: https://my.shopforcloud.com/?guest=true (this link will create a guest account for you so you can play with it quickly)

disclaimer: I'm co-founder of ShopForCloud.com

If latency to europe is acceptable for you then you might want to look into Hetzner.

$657/mo will rent you eight 32G/i7 servers there.

If europe is not acceptable then you should still look into american colos (e.g. LeaseWeb recently opened a US DC) which are not as cheap as Hetzner but will still give you 3-4 servers for the money.

Doesn't Germany have crazy data retention laws and privacy regulations? I'd be more concerned about having to follow two sets of laws than trans-atlantic latency.

Complete curiosity. I love Rackspace, but am always looking to try new things - new languages, new databases, new methods of hosting, new DNS, new foods, new music - I'm just a curious person. It's not problem with Rackspace; all of my mission-critical stuff is still hosted with you. But I use random projects of mine to to explore in multiple ways (including Black Sands by Bonobo, which I discovered last week - possibly my favorite coding album now).

Gotcha! I'll have to check out Black Sands, too.

Black sands by Bonobo is amazing. The song 'Black Sands' on the album is wonderful[0].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua2loiGHZ38

Not an album for coding per se, but if you like Bonobo you might like Pepe Deluxe's new album Queen of the Wave. It's my favourite new album of 2012. Retro psych rock and as mad as cheese.

What a coincidence - "Pepe Deluxe" is my name for my penis.

...what do you mean lowbrow humor isn't allowed on hacker news?

Unless it is particularly clever, humor is not allowed on HN.

I prefer to see it as the best album of 2010.

I moved because Rackspace was unable to resolve performance problems and outages with the interaction of the LBs in front of Cloud Sites and the Cloud Sites PHP nodes in DFW.

He wants to play downtime roulette and Rackspace just won't let him.

I'm not sure if others have noticed, but Rackspace London is probably the worst host I've ever used in my entire life. I'm not sure if this is because they were acquired or what, but it's genuinely frightening how awful the service is and how rude, irresponsible, and incompetent the staff are.

That couldn't be any further from my experience in dealing with Rackspace London. Have always found them very helpful and their technical knowledge is the best I've seen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com