Rackspace Launches Developer Discount | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace Launches Developer Discount

developer.rackspace.com

159 pointsjnoller103 comments

WHAT THE HELL, RACKSPACE?!

You emailed me just because I semi-filled in your form? I didn't even click SUBMIT! o_O

Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment?

Did you even consider that my NOT submitting the form was a conscious decision? Maybe I realized halfway through filling the form that my skill-set wasn't good enough to make me want to sign up now? Or my finances wouldn't allow me to maintain an account on your platform after six months? Or maybe, just maybe, I just didn't want to sign up right now?

Why would you take my email ID from a non-submit-clicked form and NOT tell me that you had taken it? Why? o_O

Even worse, why would you email me asking 'did I forget to take my cloud'? How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?

Using Chrome's developer tools shows the form submits your email address when it checks your username. It's possible it's going into Marketo and then you are getting emailed automatically when the record doesn't end up updating. It could be intentional, or it could be accidentally mixed with other site behaviors. I'll check on it for you and figure out what's going on. Regardless, I agree with you assertion you shouldn't be emailed if you didn't click submit.

Thanks for mentioning it!

Are you a Racker now? Bio still mentions Loggly.

I'm a contractor. Thanks for mentioning my profile - I updated my email address to the correct one!

Okay, I understand if the form is sending my email address to check if I am an existing customer. I can understand if it wants to check if the username I want is available. Both of these are valid actions and usually helpful for new customers.

However, I can assure you that the email is intentional. Here's the text of the email:

> We noticed that you started signing up for Rackspace Cloud, but you didn’t finish. Your cloud is ready for you, and it says it’s getting lonely.

Apart from the cheesiness of the text and the language, one thing stands out clearly: The process that handles your form submissions knew that I didn't finish signing up.

> Don’t let your cloud be lonely and sad – finish signing up for Rackspace Cloud and start using it to spin up a website, an app, or any awesome new project.

> You can finish your sign-up HERE.

[ed. I have removed the link associated with `HERE`]

Again, ignoring the cheesiness of the text, this sentence clearly indicates that the email is triggered when someone (like me) DOESN'T finish signing up. While I appreciate your proactive attempts to acquire potential customers, this definitely veers into creepy...

> If you have any questions about signing up or our products, give us a call or shoot us an email. We're here to help!

One question: How do I ensure that my email is NOT added to any of your newsletters that I MOST DEFINITELY - NOW OR EVER - DID NOT SIGN UP FOR?

(Apologies for the all caps. I am a little unnerved by this. I never expected RackSpace to do this sort of a thing.)

No apologies necessary - it's your data. You have a right to say how it makes you feel.

I opened a ticket on it for you: https://github.com/rackerlabs/devsite/issues/99. The dev code (which is on Github) doesn't actually implement the signup flow, so keep in mind there won't be a resulting commit for it. However, we will update you there on what we find out!

Thanks for raising the issue. Will follow it on GitHub as well.

Also, thank you for understanding and accommodating my outburst, as well as acting on it speedily. I sincerely hope (and would like to believe) that this was a one-off phenomenon and the resulting mess was completely accidental and unintended.

I would also like to request you to not judge me if I reserve my opinions until I am assured otherwise. I assure you I am not holding a grudge; I am just being cautious, that's all.

I hear you, and agree with prudency when dealing with trust issues. Tell me what you think about this: http://www.stackgeek.com/blog/kordless/post/a-code-of-trust. It's an important topic!

Just like kordless said: I concur, this is not good. I'd be just as annoyed as you, so please accept my personal apology. Kord has already filed a tracker issue for this, and I am emailing this straight to the internal teams that control signup.

Again: I'm sorry

I just replied to kordless' post.

Thank you for the apology - it does mean a lot, given the circumstances. I saw the issue on GitHub and I am following it. As I mentioned in the other post, I sincerely hope (and would like to believe) that this wasn't intentional.

Please understand that, as a consumer and a newbie developer, I will (kinda) hold you guys to high standards. A large part of my learning process involves 'watching' you guys make stuff, which I eventually try to emulate.

Therefore, when something like this happens, it is quite unnerving. I hope you understand that, I am not holding a grudge; but merely being cautious.

But they didn't spam you, or sell your e-mail to anyone. They just sent you a quick note because you abandoned a submission form.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't get one. I expected it.

> Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment?

I think that is pretty smart. There is a very good chance that people that half filled out a form, but closed down their browser wanted to register. Mountain lion kernel panics on me all of the time, so that's one case where i could get interrupted.

> How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?

That's silly. How would you ever know that anyway? One email is a little early to start worrying about spam.

Actions frequently illustrate behavioral intent. Especially given he's a developer, there's nothing wrong with him being concerned a form is doing something unexpected with his data. While I agree with you on saving a form, I'm not sure pestering you via email is the best experience.

Time to submit that dark UX pattern: http://darkpatterns.org/submit_a_pattern/. :)

Sure enough, I just got this email from a half-filled form. Seems they've had a few hours to fix it:

Subject: Oops! You Forgot to Complete your Cloud Sign-Up

Rackspace - The Open Cloud Company

Oops! You Forgot to Complete your Cloud Sign-Up

We noticed that you didn’t finish signing up for a Rackspace account. Rackspace Cloud helps thousands of customers scale their technology.

Joe runs a local pizzeria and serves thousands of customers. He uses his website to get updates and menus to his customers and fans, and host a lot of delicious images. Here’s a great example of what he can do with Rackspace Cloud:

    2GB Linux Cloud Server  
    1GB Cloud Database  
    1 Load Balancer  
    8GB Cloud Files  
    1 Monitoring Check  
    5GB bandwidth

All of these resources keep Joe’s business constantly running for his customers. He pays about $370 a month for this configuration. And he also gets Fanatical Support®, our promise to answer questions, offer advice and help each customer.

That’s just one example of what you can do with Rackspace Cloud. Want to know more? Call us to walk through your configuration needs and get a detailed cost estimate.

Ready to get started? You can finish your sign-up HERE.

    Rackspace Hosting  
    1-800-480-4982  
    ols@rackspace.com

Yeah, we ran this all the way up to the executive level. We hear you and will address it as soon as possible.

We're not a competitor and are not in this space, so I hope it's not untoward to note that we (rsync.net) also have a FOSS/.edu/dev/HN discount:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700

... so after you've got your environment up and running at rackspace (or wherever) you can get a similar discount for offsite backups.

Nice! This is excellent. We're freely hosting many OSS projects - the more FOSS/.edu/dev discounts, free tiers and benefits we can get out to the world, the better

rsync.net is fantastic, I use them for their HK datacenter which allows excellent speed to AU.

Their email about git-annex users not submitting a single ticket was funny as well. :-)

Is there any way to protect backups from being deleted? ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups. And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups (bad backup script or evil attacker trying to delete eevrything).

(not rsync, just a happy customer!) It may be a tiny bit of a chore but you can get sub-accounts set up if it's a potential problem: http://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html#7a

> ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups.

This seems's to be covered in the FAQ:

  Do you have multi-user access?

  Yes. You may configure additional users, at no cost, that can log in and share your account.
  You may control access and file permissions with standard Unix tools like 'chmod' and 'chgrp'.

So you could give each content unit its own account and protect it from the others.

> And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups

That one is fun to arrange. Many services like rsync.net offer daily snapshots for a number of days so you can't easily kill everything in one huge cock-up, but if you don't notice a problem for weeks then all your daily snapshots prior to the problem may have expired and data therefore lost. The only real answer here is to have some form of regular checking (both automated and human powered in case the automated checking fails and fails to inform you) of your backups.

Well, two things...

First, our ZFS storage arrays have read-only snapshots (7 dailies by default, or any arbitrary day/week/month by request). No charge for them, or their space, unless you do a custom retention setup.

Second, we support "pull" backups ... that is, instead of rsyncing (or wahtever) to us, we can set up a cron job on our end and pull from you, using an SSH key. That way an attacker on your system has no ability to log into your rsync.net account, nor do they even know it exists unless they watch all the network connections and put two and two together...

So we'll make it work for you ...

Pretty nifty.

One thing, while I have the ears of you Rackspace people: offer more documentation maybe? Kind of like how Linode does: https://library.linode.com/ Common things like how to run a mail server, how to get a LAMP/LEMP/LNPP/$XYZ setup going on, etc. Not full books or anything, just stuff to get things off the ground more easily when playing around. This is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to Linode, the docs, and the support whenever I'd join their IRC channel. It was good stuff, to get things running even though this is not my field by trade.

That's an excellent suggestion and I appreciate you making it! I was thinking about cookbook examples via Vagrant and Docker, which allows a user to get an environment up quickly that can be used for the learning process.

Agreed, Linode's library is awesome.

One thing we're working on already is a knowledge base. A lot of it is product-specific, but we're accumulating an increasing number of general articles like you're referring to. You can see a lot of them here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/c...

Like kordless said: Completely and totally agreed. Tutorials and best practices are critical and it is probably one of my top to-do items.

The article mentions Salt and Ansible - if you're interested in these new generation config management tools, check out my book which launches tomorrow: "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible"

http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with.

I definitely had some big surprises when writing the book. Spoiler: Ansible was by far the simplest, easiest to understand, and quickest to get up and going.

To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

I signed up, but no code yet...

I use Azure VMs but this post got me to check out your pricing again. You're not as expensive as I remember. In fact you look right in line with Azure and EC2.

Looks like with this program you can get a free 1 GB Linux or almost free 1 GB Windows server for 6 months anyway. Thanks for the program - it put you back on my radar.

Yes, we're actually very cost competitive for VMs - and cloud files includes a global CDN. I'm really, really, really happy this put us back on your radar. If you run into issues or have questions - jesse.noller@rackspace.com - my door is always open.

What's the URL to your pricing page?

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/pricing/

Do you support setting a cap on cloud files? e.g. customer sets some limit, say, $500/month, and if it ever hits that number it stops serving files instead of running up charges. And/or do you support triggers, so customer gets an email when charges run up to $200, then another email at $300, etc. ?

We don't currently support hard limits, but we've partnered with Cloudability, which lets you set budget alerts: https://cloudability.com/rackspace/

Not really good enough. It's unacceptable to ask your customers to expose themselves to unlimited billing liability. This is one thing that Google gets right and yourselves and Amazon don't: the ability to set a budget.

I bet if I didn't pay my bill on time you'd cut me off pretty quick. Why not let me tell you how much I've got to spend ahead of time so there's no nasty surprises when I get back from vacation while some bot has been rampaging through my site?

Of think of it this way: today's offer is designed to get people using Rackspace by lowering barriers. You're hoping people will like it and stay, or be too lazy to move. Don't you think the potential of an unlimited bill is another significant barrier in people's minds? I bet you're losing sign-ups.

We switched to DigitalOcean a month ago. The servers are 2x faster than rackspace (same RAM size) and we pay only half the price. DigitalOcean doesn't have all the features of rackspace (additional storage, private networks etc.), but the much better performance is everything we need.

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

SSD drives make a huge impact on server performance.

is there any benchmarking in comparison with rackspaces SSDs?

Here is a benchmark from the Rackspace site on SSD performance via Cloud Block Storage: (PDF) http://c744563d32d0468a7cf1-2fe04d8054667ffada6c4002813eccf0...

I've conducted some independent tests of various block storage options with Rackspace, EC2, HP and GCE. Here are links providing a CSV of the results (may take a few seconds to generate). A value of 100 signifies near performance parity to a baremetal SAS reference system. Overall, Rackspace SSD is performant, but lacks the consistency of EBS PIOPs or GCE persistent storage.

IOPS http://app.cloudharmony.com/cloudgrade/api/query/cloudharmon...

IO Consistency http://app.cloudharmony.com/cloudgrade/api/query/cloudharmon...

There's also an excellent writeup by GlusterFS contributor Jeff Darcy:

http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2012/10/rackspace-bloc...

But DO is a basic service, only VMs, with little control over network, storage, etc.

DigitalOcean doesn't have all the features of rackspace

Looks like no Windows, so no go for me.

EC2 is way cheaper

medium utilized reserved "m1.large" instance, which has 7.5Gb of RAM + 2*420Gb of local storage costs $1272 a year max (less if you don't use it all the time). If you go with heavy-utilization instance it's even cheaper. see https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#tabm1

Rackspace's 8GB/320GB instance costs $4200 a year.

That's quite a difference

You are comparing the reserved price which isn't apples to apples. Even so, you are correct.

The m1.large rate in the east is $0.240/hour and the rackspace instances is $0.48/hour. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public-pricing/

Also, don't forget that the heavy reservation is billed for every hour in the term, not when you have it turned on.

> With this RI [Heavy], you pay a little higher upfront payment than Medium Utilization RIs, a significantly lower hourly usage fee, and you’re charged that lower hourly rate for _every hour in the Reserved Instance term you purchase_.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/

> You are comparing the reserved price which isn't apples to apples

I would be glad to compare with Rackspace's "reserved" prices if they had one :)

> Also, don't forget that the heavy reservation is billed for every hour in the term, not when you have it turned on.

That's why I compared prices to "medium utilization". Again, Rackspace doesn't have prepaid option similar to "heavy utilization".

And I didn't mention instances reserved for "3 years" which result in even larger discount, if you're interested in long-term solution

The Rackspace instance you are referencing has 4 vCPUs in it - the m1.large on Amazon has 2. Also, don't forget the prepay amounts on EC2 reserved instances in your calculations! The prepay for 1 year on the m1.large is $243, making a reserved m1.large $1434 a year (365 days * 24 hours * $0.136/hour + $243).

$0.136 is "Light utilization". I referenced "medium utilization" which is $0.084

I have to say here that I've been impressed with both the price and performance of Cloudfiles.

I was using S3+Cloudfront for a long time and with cloudfiles my bills pretty much HALVED.

What made the difference ? GET request pricing. Amazon S3 charges for each get request on an object, so with millions of requests on small objects, you get hit pretty hard.

Also, Akamai seems to be really fast :)

And like always: I'm around to answer questions.

Why not Germany :( Or rather why is it restricted to the US and the UK?

It's not: I just pushed a change to master and I am waiting on the cache to invalidation. Anyone anywhere can use either the UK or US clouds. I made a mistake saying "I am in..."

I've signed up to about 4 different hosts recently (including Rackspace) to test them out. If I wanted to take you up on the offer would I have to sign up for a new account or can it be back dated?

Thanks!

I apologize; new accounts only - we can not back date or apply to existing. Limitations! :(

Understandable, cheers!

Cloud Files invalidations: Is it technically possible to make invalidations that are performed in just a couple of minutes or even seconds? That's a feature I really miss both on Cloud Files and on CloudFront.

Checking with the product team right now.

Hi, I work on the cloudfiles team. I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN. Currently, the minimum that it can be is 15 minutes. We partner with Akamai for the CDN functionality, so while we get all the benefits of the Akamai network, we also have to work within the parameters of their systems. Would you mind sharing more about your use case for needing shorter TTLs?

I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN

Actually I'm talking about what you refer to as edge purge (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-cdn-gets-edge-purg...) and AWS refers to as invalidations.

Ahh, sorry. Yes, there are limitations around edge purging (how many you can do at a time, and how long it takes for the purges to occur). All of these are also dependent on parameters defined by Akamai. I'll pass the feedback on to our product team as we try to make that experience better. Thanks!

Is there any possibility Rackspace may add a spot market to their product offering? Indeed if you or anyone else has any insight as to why Amazon remains (to my knowledge) the only "cloud" hosting vendor to offer spot pricing I'd be very interested.

I'm going to apologize - but I can not comment future-looking/roadmap items like this. I can say I would like it - but beyond that not much else.

I expected that, thanks anyway. Really I was just checking there wasn't some sort of "Rackspace is fundamentally opposed to the concept of spot pricing" belief I had missed somewhere. Cheers.

From what I see there is no restriction if you are an existing rackspace customer to get this discount for anything new.

So you may want to consider a way that the discount can be applied on any new services signed up for in the existing cloud panel.

While it's trivial for someone to sign up for a new account, it would make more sense (for your tracking purposes) to have people just enable the discount (once again on additional services) in an existing RS cloud account.

Besides would like to just manage everything from the same account generally.

I agree; in a perfect world (and the one I'd like to see) we would be able to apply this to existing accounts. Given internal limitations though, it's not as simple as it should be. Let me talk to customer service and see if we can do this if a user contacts us.

Can you fix apps.rackspace email? I've been using it for 2 years now and I am unable to compose emails on iOS devices. The compose pain won't respond to the device keyboard. Otherwise great.

Sent to the product team

ujsfdo, try https://app.rackspace.com/mobile and let me know what you think.

Will I be able to sign up for developer discount next year?

We do not have an end date for this discount right now. Hopefully we can just continually improve it.

Any chance that you're going to improve the instance startup time soon? It's really bad now - even compared to a naïve setup of devstack on small spinning medium. I'm sure that lots of your customers use the latest release of ubuntu as a base image so I'd expect it is cached locally on most hosts... I don't get why it would take minutes to spawn a new instance in that case :( (Openstack dev's perspective)

Yes. This is an extremely high priority

6 months/$300 credit - similar to the AWS 1 year free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/. Rackspace needs to upgrade their underlying years old AMD 4170/2374 hardware for cloud servers. This is a limitation for vertical scaling, and doesn't compare well to EC2/GCE/HP.

Are you talking about the cloud server (nova) hosts, or the dedicated gear?

cloud servers

thanks - let me talk to the teams. I can't talk about migrations / upgrades publicly, but I know the teams have been working on this and thinking hard on it.

That would be good - I wrote a blog post on the topic. Rackspace cloud servers CPU performance caps out low and $/CPU value isn't good on large instance types: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-...

What are the odds on making a very low power machine, in the 96-128 MB of RAM, for say, $1-$3/month? I like RS (have been a customer since 2008) but the minimum service is still overkill for what I like to do. I use other services like buyvm.net for low-cost machines.

Our student group has been in the Rackspace Startup Program, where it receives a similar discount every month. Looking at the billing records, I want to point out that the way Rackspace runs the accounting is a bit oddly - they charge my credit card the full amount, then issue a refund a few days later. On my statement, it surprised me to see a charge- keep this in mind, especially if you intend to stay under $50/month and do not anticipate charges.

This is handled completely differently than the startup program discounts. This is an automated discount code via the shopping cart which is applied (which is a first for us as a company).

Good to hear you guys have finally updated your billing system. We and many others had refused to accept the $24k sponsorship because of the insane requirement.

Only US and UK at the moment, any chance to showing us devs down under in Australia some love?

Edit: Especially since there are now .au Rackspace data centres!

We are working as fast as possible to expand it to the other locales as soon as we can.

let us know when you do!

I am a UK national, just signed up using my UK bank account, however, I am currently living in Mexico, where I also have a bank account. Is there any chance I can change my credit card and address? I don't mind having a London (LON) server for now.

Contact customer service: they will take care of you!

Is this Discount available for a limited time only or on all future signups?

I'm about to finish a project and travel for a couple of weeks so I don't anticipate myself using it anytime within the next month. As a result, if this discount is not expiring, I'd prefer delaying the signup by a month =)

We do not have a plan to terminate this discount that anyone has told me. In fact I would like to keep it for the foreseeable future.

It's going to stick around for a while, and definitely longer than a month! :)

The discount says it doesn't apply to cloud sites or managed cloud, but on the signup page I only see options for cloud account or managed cloud. If I select Cloud Account, will the discount still apply?

Cloud Sites is a specific product: you want to use "Cloud Account" - sorry I couldn't strip out the other options when signing up. There's some history / time there that applies.

No support for the North? Sad to see Canada not included.

We don't have data centers in Canada, but Chicago may have recently been annexed to Canada. So, if you are fine with using a US based cloud account, just sign up and use the Chicago region/datacenter.

You, and all of Canada are welcome!

I may be wrong on this, but I'm at least 60% certain that Chicago is in Canada. Correct?

Canada wishes, if only for the restaurants..

Do you have instructions or a guide on how to migrate an existing Windows VM from Amazon to your cloud?

This might help: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-...

EDIT: Also, this is a mapping of AWS resources to Rackspace resources: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of...

:( credit card required

rackspace ripped me off

Before making bold claims, you should really state what happened and what they tried (or didn't try) to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com