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"We wouldn't be here if it weren't for The Rackspace Cloud. We can spin up new servers in seconds, and the resources are so affordable, we're able to offer the service free to consumers - forever."Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 instances are transient or ephemeral—if there is a host failure that causes your instance to terminate, all local data on that instance will be lost.
Cloud Servers
One of the most significant differences between Cloud Servers and EC2 is the persistence of each virtual server. Cloud Servers has access to local, RAID10 disk storage, much like you'd expect in a physical server. This is important because it means your Server has inherent protection against drive failures. If for some reason the host does fail or become degraded, we will restart and/or migrate your Cloud Server for you. A failure doesn't mean that your Cloud Server goes away.
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 instances start at 1.7 GB so if your workload requires fewer resources, you are stuck paying for much more than you need.
Cloud Servers
We provide a wide variety of Cloud Server sizes, starting at 256 MB and going up to 16 GB. Cloud Servers can be resized to scale up or down without any reinstallation.
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 instances have a capped CPU. If additional CPU capacity is required, you need to launch another instance.
Cloud Servers
Cloud Servers has guaranteed minimum CPU power (relative to the size of the Cloud Server), with free bursting when extra capacity is available on the host.
Amazon EC2
While the pricing of EC2 instances appears to be lower, if it takes more than twice the time to complete a task, the total price to complete a task increases proportionally.
Cloud Servers
A recent study conducted by an independent third party demonstrated that Cloud Servers is, on average, more than two times more powerful than Amazon EC2.
Amazon EC2
Amazon has a block storage solution that can show better performance than their built-in ephemeral storage under the right conditions; however, this solution results in additional costs, as both the amount of data stored and transferred are billed for.
Cloud Servers
A recent study conducted by an independent third party demonstrated that on average Cloud Servers have a higher disk throughput.
Amazon EC2
With EC2, the IP configuration is more complex. Each instance gets a non-persistent private IP address NATed to a public IP address. When instances terminate and new ones are launched, a new private IP address is assigned which means you need to plan for changing private IPs (although Elastic IPs can be remapped). In addition, only one NATed IP address is available which, for example, does not lend itself to hosting multiple sites via SSL.
Cloud Servers
Each Cloud Server comes with the simplicity of a dedicated and persistent public IP address (no NAT) with a second, private IP address for free. There is also low latency bandwidth between your Cloud Servers. Additional public IPs are available upon request and shared IPs can be provided for high availability.
Amazon EC2
In the ephemeral world of EC2, there is no interactive web console access, no rescue mode, and no server level backup capability as these are all useful tools for managing persistent servers. In addition, Amazon offers no authoritative DNS capability which means you need to use an external DNS service or run your own DNS servers for any domains you run in the cloud.
Cloud Servers
Cloud Servers has a variety of tools available to make managing each Cloud Server easier:
Amazon EC2
To receive 24x7x365 support for Amazon EC2, you pay the greater of $400 per month or 20% (scaling down) of your EC2 costs. That means your support cost goes up with your EC2 usage and isn’t directly related to the amount of support you use.
Cloud Servers
Cloud Servers is backed by the legendary Fanatical Support you can only get from Rackspace. Included for free, you'll have access to our forums and online resources.
Amazon EC2
Amazon only offers part of the answer, with only cloud solutions.
Cloud Servers
Depending on your needs, you can get the best of both worlds with a combination of cloud and dedicated servers. Why make a trade when you can have both under one roof from Rackspace?
Amazon EC2
Amazon tends to be less focused on standards and openness.
Cloud Servers
The Rackspace Cloud approach is one that is standards-based and open. As an active member of organizations such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), The Rackspace Cloud collaborates to develop standards and promote interoperability. To help ensure that the community shaped the Cloud Servers API, The Rackspace Cloud solicited feedback and conducted intensive testing with its partners and cloud developers.
BuySellAds.com is an advertising marketplace for small- to medium-sized website owners and publishers.
"Here’s the problem we had: we just couldnt get physical servers built fast enough. We got really tired of dealing with hardware and contracts."Hardware Servers
To put a physical server online, new equipment has to be racked, and memory, hard drives, and network cards need to be installed. The good news is that you usually have a lot of say over what goes in the box; the bad news is that it can take days or weeks for the server to be ready. Our server needs at BuySellAds.com are pretty straightforward, so we donʼt need to dictate the exact hardware. To us, speed is much more important.
Cloud Servers
We provide a wide variety of Cloud Server sizes, starting at 256 MB going up to 16 GB. Cloud Servers can be resized to scale up or down without any reinstallation.
Hardware Servers
In our experience, we've always had to pay some sort of setup fee plus the first month in advance. Often you can get locked into a contract that spans months or years for hardware that you're not sure you'll be needing for that long.
Cloud Servers
You can put up a Cloud Server for an hour and a moment later, delete it. The total cost for that exercise: about 2 cents! Sometimes we have servers up for a few days or many months. Still there's some nice freedom in not having long-term contracts.
Hardware Servers
We hated shopping for hardware servers. Too big, and you're overpaying. Too small, and you're not prepared for demand. Signing long-term commitments is nerve-wracking.
Cloud Servers
Cloud Servers start small (and cheap), but one thing people often miss is that they can be resized at any time. So you can start with a 256 MB server, and before the end of the month, scale it right up to 16 GB of memory. This allows us to keep our servers "right-sized" so we're only paying for what we use.
Hardware Servers
We've never seen a provider that allows you to clone physical servers the way you can in the cloud.
Cloud Servers
Here's a neat trick: when we launch a Cloud Server, we configure it the way we need it, then save a backup. When we need another server of that type, we can instantly launch one as a clone from the backup.
Razorfish is one of the largest interactive marketing and technology companies in the world.
"More and more of our clients are coming to us for technology recommendations. We're often suggesting either Cloud Servers or Cloud Sites because we trust Rackspace with our business."Cloud Sites
Cloud Sites is a fully managed platform. To get a new site going, we just FTP our code up to the Cloud and it runs across a large pool of load-balanced servers automatically. We don't have to manage things like the operating system or applications like Apache or MySQL. Rackspace does all of that for us. But, since we can't modify the environment, what we run has to be a fit for the platform.
Cloud Servers
Each Cloud Server comes with full root access. Just like a dedicated server, a Cloud Server provides total flexibility for us to run anything we want: from a Java website to a Ruby on Rails application.
However, since we're in full control of the environment, we need to manage it ourselves. Rackspace can only help us with the network, data center, and the host machine.
Cloud Sites
Cloud Sites already supports both Linux technologies (like Apache and MySQL) and Windows technologies (like .NET and MS SQL).
Cloud Servers
Currently, Cloud Servers only supports Linux-based servers. That wasn't a problem for us since we're a Linux shop. (Windows-powered Cloud Servers are coming soon.)
Cloud Sites
Each site we add to Cloud Sites sits on a redundant cluster of servers and is automatically load balanced for us. This means the platform can scale across many servers to handle a promotional campaign site (as an example) without any server or network configuration on our part.
Cloud Servers
You can grow an individual Cloud Server from 256 MB up to 16 GB in size (hard drive space and processing power scale up with the memory). But when we need to cluster Cloud Servers together, we have to do that on our own or with the help of a partner like RightScale.
Cloud Sites
Since it's a platform Rackspace manages on your behalf, they have a dedicated team handling security for you. You’ll have to make sure to keep code like WordPress up to date, but they take care of the operating system, Apache, MySQL, IIS, MS SQL, and other system applications.
Cloud Servers
We're pretty comfortable managing our Cloud Servers from the operating system on up, because we have developers and sys admins on site. However, it's important to note that you'll need to keep your servers secure and patched if you go this route.
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