Rackspace has increased server costs twofold, and nobody has noticed. | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace has increased server costs twofold, and nobody has noticed.

20 pointstrocker13 comments

I migrated to the NEXTGEN servers because of the benefits listed everywhere. I built a server and realized that our processes (which were cpu intensive) were taking twice the time they used to on Firstgen.

The response from their side was 'You get "occasional" CPU bursts in Firstgen & that is the reason.

I decided to benchmark the cpu performance & found out that I was right about it.

I contacted the customer care again with this tests: http://pastebin.com/k0uefXMh

Joe concluded by saying ' The test results were because of occassional cpu bursts' , even when I mentioned that burst was accounted for.

The test results: http://pastebin.com/aArbwAq2

This time I wanted conclusive results proving the customer care wrong & placed 3 firstgen servers with a cronjob running every minute to benchmark to check for cpu burst. Following were the results :

Server 1 - Report : http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?d4c24ce3d92b4be6#pDtNzAhU8M3X/J1zLsmuYgIUHxwhYjmNuiic/rxbNng=

Only Total Time Report : http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?e902ee80be6a2c8d#GvW0Ab52F0iqNZr5dFMi7UzqX4Ux9NA54V1wGvHZnDc=

Server 2 -

Report: http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?c33c9030eb01e2af#Iid3w7rWgJ+ysDJZx2ULCzyItXBv04Q83tmGp066nTE=

Time Report : http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?a27a204039529abd#yTKoy3qZQUxbIsAOIyYWwlIgIHWnYnfbpkfDuiS/8YA=

Server 3 -

Report : http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?a32c096ad8f1968b#psOme81n2DPgYp8aK7i75v/WsETs6bmVLKaoHS0CVqY=

Only Time Report : http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?31a9d12316d9cbd2#LblvVwH+sGzQytOwU8DM9wtH5eN+87jAbUL7UnpNOH4=

All the results were consistent, proving me right. I went back to the customer care with this just to be terribly disappointed with their response. Here is the conversation : http://pastebin.com/cedtk1zL

Here is the benchmark script that ran every minute : http://pastebin.com/UeskWw5M

Increasing the price two folds is one thing & not informing customers about it is another. The latter is the one I am more disappointed in.

Below is the Official Rackspace Response to this thread:

vCPU allocations for next generation cloud servers were adjusted to provide more consistent performance, not to extract more profit. Rackspace is not making any more money per server than before. In fact, we recently reduced the price for 512Mb and 30Gb servers by an average of 30%. We take transparency seriously, so we published an article detailing the changes and explaining the logic behind it which you can read here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/whitepaper/cpu-in-....

Erik Carlin, director of product management put it this way “"Our goal is to find the sweet spot that maximizes price performance while still providing a consistent experience." Customers with larger flavors are experiencing higher and more consistent performance with next generation cloud servers. Depending on the load running at a given time in neighbor instances, performance can be higher for small instances too. We are working with a third party on benchmarks which we expect to publish in the next few weeks.

Wow, I'm sure this will be more rampant with cloud services and their black-box billing. Unless good people like you compare what they're getting to what they're paying for companies like Rackspace will just keep gobbling up smaller firms and jacking up their prices to boot.

Well, I wont go so far calling Rackspace a 'bad' company as such, afterall they have an excellent customer support - but there are somethings which should never be overlooked or , for that matter, never be done when you have such a huge customer base. Rackspace is just taking a wrong turn here!

Hopefully this will get enough attention that we can get a response from Rackspace.

That is what I was expecting from HN community. It would be really sad to see this go unnoticed.

Rackspace ripped me off.

We'd be happy to look into what happened. If you'd like us to, please email help@rackspace.com with your account info and details about the experience that you're referencing. Thanks.

Oh hell no. I'll never deal with you guys again.

RS is only used by those that haven't found the beauty that is EC2.

sure, github, thenextweb & countless others ovelooked the beauty that EC2 was.Right?

There are countless differences between EC2 & Rackspace for example CPU - rackspace's performance is way better than EC2. You should benchmark your scripts on both & then compare.

They're both using the same virtualization. What's your use case that requires that much CPU? I'd bet spot instances would be a better fit in most cases.

Yup, spot instances would surely fit. And yes EC2 is awesome too. No point in changing the thread to a different discussion altogether. Even if Rackspace is #2, this is not what was expected of it, right? Changing the provider to EC2 is an option that everyone has but that has enormous overhead too!

The only benefit Rackspace provides is their customer support; if I want infrastructure, I'm going to Amazon, and then building out my colo when a load profile has been established.

If you've got the staff to build out a web property, you've got the staff to man a rack of equipment.

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