Rackspace launches Performance Cloud Servers | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace launches Performance Cloud Servers

rackspace.com

44 pointsropiku31 comments

Wouldn't poke them with a 20' long stick.

When we spoke to their rep about data security and access in the UK they made no guarantees about our stuff being secure from meddling by their own staff or external agencies. They literally told us that we'd be better off elsewhere and refused to comment further.

we're in a position where we have UK data protection to consider and shipping data out of the EEA is illegal for us. Obviously this is still a problem if someone takes it.

In the end we ended up with a wholly UK owned DC and company.

Where did you end up?

http://www.thebunker.net/

> they made no guarantees about our stuff being secure from meddling by their own staff or external agencies

Short of renting a cage, how could any provider guarantee that?

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/ (scroll down a bit) has the pricing, they start at $0.68/hr for 15GB of ram, 40gb ssd system disk, 150gb ssd data disk and 4 vcpus. Significantly cheaper (however with lower specs) than the cheapest Amazon offering with an SSD ($3.10/hr I believe).

That's $480 per month. That might be competitive against AWS, but a 16gb Linode is $320 and 16gb Digital Ocean is only $160. Why would I want to pay so much more for Rackspace's? Or is this only for people who don't know that services other than AWS exist?

That pricing is the "performance 2" group. The "performance 1" group starts at:

$0.04/hr for 1 GB RAM, 20GB SSD system disk, 1 vcpu.

That is about $30/month. More than Digital Ocean but a much cheaper entry point than the prices you listed.

OK but not only is Digital Ocean a lot cheaper but so is Linode. Does the Rackspace server have a better CPU, or am I paying for better support supposedly, or what?

I haven't tested all the providers heavily enough relative performances or support realities to know and I wasn't contradicting you but the parent post listing incorrect entry pricing for the performance models.

Having used rackspace for the past 5 years, I'm happy to see some more performance machines in the cloud.

We have quite a CPU intensive infrastructure so will be benchmarking the new performance servers against themselves to see if it is still cheaper to scale out then scale up.

If you have a CPU intensive infrastructure, why in the world are you using or considering cloud servers? Unless these are in use just a fraction of the day?

You can get several times the CPU capacity for around the same price with dedicated servers. And nothing stops you from combining and scaling out with cloud servers to handle peaks.

We scale based on load, so rather then having dedicated boxes being unused during quiet times we can scale our infrastructure down and then up when we need to. Going to a hybrid platform maybe in the future

I used Rackspace back in 2000 for my first startup after our existing hosting solution could not take the load.

This was a huge mistake!

Rackspace canceled our contract without warning and without the ability to get our data. Their customer care was extremely rude and completely incompetent. I will never ever host anything again with Rackspace.

Luckily we had external backups and were able to purchase our own hardware and install it in a local Boston data center.

I'd seriously hope things have changed in 13 years, there's a pretty big difference between 2 and 15 years experience. You're probably safe to drop the grudge at this point

wouldn't touch rackspace with a stick. We tried them for 6 months - particularly because we weren't price sensitive and wanted the "fanatic service" they promised. The service however is terrible bordering on non-existant. Digital Ocean or Linode on the other hand - price + service I'm happy with!

Their service was terrible? Maybe you just had some rather unlucky experience. We've been using RackSpace (I'm based in the UK) for almost 2 years now and their service has really been fantastic. To give you one example, I had an almost 2 hour phone call (no charge by the way) trying to track down an issue with our LAMP stack.

We've had a horrible experience with Rackspace. Truly awful. We're in the UK, hosting in London (as a backup) with Linode as a primary. The main problem is that Rackspace has no proactive monitoring or support in any way, and their boxes tend to thrash a lot due to misbehaving "noisy neighbours". Their support staff are really poorly trained as well and most of them are new.

I'd be interested in hearing from them if the noisy neighbour problem will still be relevant now that everything is on an SSD, or if it just delays the inevitable.

Regardless, we'll just wait for Linode though - they'll deliver it cheaper and better, with much better support.

If you're a developer looking for more benchmarks / comparisons - I put http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-to-performance-c... up this morning. Raw data in github; and I'd love to get more to run.

Someone in their design team apparently made a mistake and removed the "next generation" server pricing (non SSD). For reference, those prices are: https://web.archive.org/web/20130627213956/https://www.racks...

These "next gen" servers (now 'Standard' flavor in their API) are still available and the 'Performance' servers are currently only available at their IAD (Northern Virginia) datacenter.

To bad this is still about 26x more expensive than Hetzner.

Hetzner just launched new servers themselves.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

For €139/mo. :

- new E5-1650 hexcore CPU

- 128GB of ECC RAM

- 2 x 240GB SSD

Edit: formatting and price comparison of €139 vs $3971/mo. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/

How much do they cost? Seems like this is a response to Digital Ocean.

I wonder how long until Rack space and the rest provide a Docker container service.

DigitalOcean isn't really Rackspaces competitor in terms of pricing.

Docker works fine with rackspace, doesn't it?

edit, pricing: As Performance Cloud Servers roll out, they will replace Standard Cloud Servers as our default offering.

> Docker works fine with rackspace, doesn't it?

I'm assuming what he meant is support for deploying Docker containers directly rather than renting a server and installing Docker on it and running your containers in that.

Right. Its similar to the distinction between installing Xen yourself on a dedicated server versus using a VPS provider.

I am actually working on a service where you can easily deploy VPSs that have Docker installed on them with a control panel for conveniently managing the containers. I can then have features like a menu option to move containers between VMs and automatically creating DNS and proxy configuration for container-based virtual hosting. I.e. you click a button on the container and just type in the sub domain or domain name next to the public port exposed by Docker and then that gets automatically set up so you can access that service on that container through a domain name.

We have single click Docker deployment - go to servers, select "deployments" then select the docker option. We also have scientific python images, and more

Is the 'We' here Rackspace? Am confused :s

Yes, sorry - the "we" is rackspace.

Cool.. so Digital Ocean also has a Docker image. Does your Docker image also have a control panel for Docker? Does it have a way to move containers between VMs? Does it have an automatic DNS and proxy configuration for connecting domains/subdomains to exposed container ports?

So how much will performance servers cost? Why isn't DO a competitor in terms of pricing? I remember when I built on Rackspace's old API it was like 10 or 11 bucks a month for the cheapest server. Then the cheapest 2nd gen is like $16. So I am guessing this is less than $16 per month?

I still dont get these so Called Cloud Hosting, When i can order 2 Dedicated Servers in OVH / Hetzner for Redundancy and it will still cost 50% less then what RackSpace offers.

you better try: http://www.df.eu/de/cloud-hosting/cloud-server/ (cheaper + more power) → a strato company!

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