Ask HN: Amazon S3 vs Rackspace Cloud? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Amazon S3 vs Rackspace Cloud?

6 pointsDonnyK6 comments

API, pricing, reliability, customer service... what was your experience?

Rackspace cloud has great customer service (they did as Mosso too). We pay about 150 a month for our hosting (4 servers, 2 paid by clients). We're small time, sure, but upgrading/resizing is super easy and we've never experienced any downtime (knock on wood) of any of our servers.

Our dev server is running 5 rails apps in testing on a 256 box so it's well worth the money if you just want to try it out (it's about 20 bucks a month).

They also gave me a sweet tshirt. But that doesn't skew my love for the RS cloud ;)

Rackspace is tough to beat for customer service. Reliability is on par with Amazon in my experience. Are you just interested in cloud storage (S3 vs Cloud Files)? I went with Rackspace for Cloud Files because of the one-click Limelight CDN feature. Amazon S3 + CloudFront was more complicated to implement.

I'm not sure how in any shape or form CloudFront is complicated to implement. It is literally as follows:

1) Create an amazon S3 bucks 2) Upload your files to that bucket 3) Publish that S3 bucket to cloudfront with two clicks in the AWS console 4) Update your DNS CName to point to your CloudFront distribution

Rackspace is fantastic for customer service, but for CDN services, you'll have to weight whether the difference between 22 cents/GB vs Amazon's 10 cents/GB for US bandwidth distribution is worth it.

IMHO it is tough to justify 12 cents/GB just for "better" customer service for a CDN.

Doesn't Amazon charge for bandwidth from S3 to Cloudfront as well as bandwidth from edge servers? The pricing I saw was 17 cents/GB for CloudFront, plus the cost to transfer from S3.

Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your files. Normal fees will apply for Amazon S3 usage, including "origin fetches" - data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge locations.

Rackspace is great for customer service. However, feels like we've paid them way too much over the years...

Amazon S3 rocks! We've moved everything over to them - except a billion emails still sitting with Rackspace...

If you need the support I would go with rackspace. If you dont need help AWS is better IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com