Comment by ColinCera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColinCera | Hacker News Reader

As near as I can figure, the OnMetal servers are 3x-5x what I'd pay for dedicated servers from, say, a Hurricane reseller, and the virtual servers are more than 2x as much as comparable Linode servers, with the Linode servers offering way more SSD storage, more bandwidth, etc.

Not to mention, Rackspace charges you $120 per terabyte of data transfer, while you'll get several terabytes of transfer free/included when buying from Linode or most dedicated server resellers.

That seems like a hefty premium for...what? The Rackspace name? Is there any reason to believe that Rackspace has better uptime/reliability than Linode? Any reason to believe Rackspace has better hardware than Linode? Given that neither company — as with most cloud providers — provides any truly meaningful transparency, it's impossible to say.

For my money, I think I'd rather spend less of it, or spend the same amount and get more/redundant servers.

I'm genuinely struggling to understand the value of Rackspace.

Earlier this month Rackspace switched away from offering any servers without managed support, even in their cloud. So every server or VM you get from Rackspace now will come with 24/7/365 support, including phone calls with engineers.

That's the main reason their stuff is more expensive than AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc. They just decided that their competitive edge is support, so they aren't going to compete with those guys on price any more. This will probably lose them customers in startups, but improve their margins overall.

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/newsarticles/rackspace-goes-al...

I'm genuinely struggling to understand the value of Rackspace.

See [1]: "We don't offer raw infrastructure without service." That is, support is included in the cost. Lots of people don't need support or don't want to pay for it, particularly the startup-oriented crowd here on HN. But I would be interested in a comparison of Rackspace's support to others'.

Rackspace charges you $120 per terabyte of data transfer

Is this in the fine print somewhere? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't see it mentioned in [1].

1: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/

Actually, I didn't notice that support was required. I was basing my cost comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing — the fact you are required to purchase support at additional cost makes their pricing even less competitive.

They have a more detailed pricing page, with bandwidth charges listed near the bottom, here: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/

>I was basing my cost comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing

As parent clearly stated, there is no raw infrastructure pricing; all pricing includes support already.

Perhaps you should pay a visit to the link parent posted, so you would understand what I was talking about.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/

Where they present their pricing in the format of a "Raw Infrastructure" price plus your choice of 2 different levels of support. So, there is raw infrastructure pricing — if you'd visited the page before posting, you'd have known that's where I got the nomenclature in the first place — but you must also purchase some form of support (where the pricing varies for different support levels).

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