Freshbooks is the leader in online invoicing and bookkeeping.
"I can get someone on the phone at Rackspace. I can't even find a phone number on Amazon's Web site"We've worked hard to create affordable, scalable online storage that's driven by Fanatical Support. Freshbooks did the math below to compare our pricing and support with Amazon's.
The Details: 5TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 1TB. 100GB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 150KB.
| Products | Monthly Costs | Cloud Files Saves you... | % of Savings with Files |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Files (support included) | $985.33 | - | - |
| S3 + Cloud Front (+ AWS Gold support) | $1,334.33 | $349.00 | 26.16 |
The Details: 5TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 1TB. 100GB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 75KB.
| Products | Monthly Costs | Cloud Files Saves you... | % of Savings with Files |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Files (support included) | $1,118.67 | - | - |
| S3 + Cloud Front (+ AWS Gold support) | $1,401.67 | $283.00 | 20.19 |
The Details: 100TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 500GB. 5TB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 150KB.
| Products | Monthly Costs | Cloud Files Saves you... | % of Savings with Files |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Files (support included) | $16,206.67 | - | - |
| S3 + Cloud Front (+ AWS Gold support) | $18,300.47 | $2,093.80 | 11.44 |
750GB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 50GB. 0GB of pure storage related outbound bandwidth (excluding origin fetch). CDN bandwidth is 500GB in the US, 300GB in Europe, 200GB in Hong Kong, and 100GB in Japan. Average file size is 75KB. 80% CDN cache hit.
| Products | Monthly Costs | Cloud Files Saves you... | % of Savings with Files |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Files (support included) | $371.83 | - | - |
| S3 + Cloud Front (+ AWS Gold support) | $780.90 | $409.07 | 52.38 |
Notes: The calculator we used is available here (served via Cloud Files and Limelight) so you can run your own cost comparison. The "key features" of Amazon's Gold level support plan (which costs an extra $400+/month) come included with Cloud Files — that's what Fanatical Support is all about. So, in order to compare apples to apples, we've baked the cost of Amazon's gold plan into the monthly cost for S3 + Cloud Front.
We ran a few speed tests for CDN content between Amazon and Rackspace. A little background: Amazon opted to build their own content delivery network (CDN) while Rackspace chose to partner with Limelight Networks, a leading, global CDN provider. Limelight serves some of the largest media customers in the world (including Disney, MSNBC, NetFlix, Microsoft Xbox, and Amazon Video on Demand) and has an extensive world-wide network.
The Details: 5 TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 1 TB. 100 GB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 150 KB.
| Products | MAverage Response Time |
|---|---|
| Rackspace Cloud Files | 0.062 |
| Amazon Cloud Files | 0.166 |
Summary: The average response time is 62ms for Cloud Files and 166ms for Cloud Front, which means that in the US Cloud Files is 2.7 times or 168% faster than Cloud Front.
The Details: 5 TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 1 TB. 100 GB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 150 KB.
| Products | MAverage Response Time(sec) |
|---|---|
| Rackspace Cloud Files | 0.080 |
| Amazon Cloud Files | 0.141 |
Summary: The average response time is 80ms for Cloud Files and 141ms for Cloud Front, which means that in the US Cloud Files is 1.8 times or 76% faster than Cloud Front.
The Details: 5 TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 1 TB. 100 GB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 150 KB.
| Products | Average Response Time (sec) |
|---|---|
| Rackspace Cloud Files | 0.679 |
| Amazon Cloud Files | 1.203 |
Summary: The average response time is 679ms for Cloud Files and 1,203ms for Cloud Front, which means that in the US Cloud Files is 1.8 times or 77% faster than Cloud Front.
The Details: 5 TB of cloud storage. Inbound bandwidth of 1 TB. 100 GB of outbound bandwidth. Average file size is 150 KB.
| Products | MAverage Response Time |
|---|---|
| Rackspace Cloud Files | 0.109 |
| Amazon Cloud Files | 0.173 |
Summary: The average response time is 109ms for Cloud Files and 173ms for Cloud Front, which means that in the US Cloud Files is 1.6 times or 59% faster than Cloud Front.
Check out the results of a CDN test another customer ran to decide between Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon's CloudFront.
Check out our other products: 
