My 1,5 cents on Amazon EC2 vs Rackspace Cloud Servers.

There was a time when there was only one (known) IaaS provider, but competition has arrived, targeting different people with different needs...

Indeed Amazon has a lot more features, but it happens to be that I need none of it, like probably any small-medium business needs. And that seems to be the target of Cloud Servers.

I've been hosting my personal and company demo sites on both IaaS providers and doing some (un-professional) performance tests with installs of ubuntu at both platforms too...

POINT 1: I whas at EC2 for several month and the performance of small instances for 72$ whas really dissapointing. Now I have 2x256MB instances plus 1x512MB Instance at Rackspace Cloud Servers. The smallest 256 MB instances (11$/month) perform better than an EC2 small instance (now at 61$/month) In fact these little monsters seem to perform nearly as well as my home server (Intel 3GH with 1 GB RAM).

POINT 2: Instead of being forced to run all the services I need in one EC2 instance for 61$, now I have 3 separated and isolated instances for just 40$. that I can shut down separately if not needed. I don't need hundreds of instances to burst for my personal use, I just need something easy to use, a way to have 3 different machines isolated (webserver, CRM demo server, mail server).

POINT 3: At CS I can put my SMB CRM customers in the cloud for 10$/month on isolated VM's and later scale them up to 1024 MB or 2048MB when the customization is done by just restarting the instance.

POINT 4: Support is a KEY DIFFERENCE; I mean, that level of quality on support is already worth half of the price of the instance and would be costing hundreds at Amazon.

POINT 5: The web console viewer is awesome, you can see everything that happens on your instance while restarting, witch can not be seen at amazon cause you have to login first ant that can't happen untill the instance is up.

POINT 6: DNS services with PTR's for FREE!!!

POINT 7: CONNECTIVITY IS FIRST CLASS!

Ping 67.23.46.59 [www.cloudslices.com]

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 14 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 18 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 19 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 18 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 12 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 9 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 13 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 7 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 16 ms

Round trip time to 67.23.46.59: 16 ms

Average time over 10 pings: 14.2 ms

No words need to be added ;-)

POINT 8: They sen't me a Cloud Servers T-shirt for free, to spain! ;-)

DRAWBACK1: There is one thing I didn't like at all on Cloud Servers. The DNS service is free and really easy to setup, but you just can not add TXT records to it. ... Anyway, I just sent a ticket to support and they did it for me, in some minutes I received an email stating that my TXT records where created.

DRAWBACK2: I could not reach one of the instances I created, so it seems the whole thing still needs some fine tuning already. Already, I just chated with support, 2 mins after the instance was reacheable.

DRAWBACK 3: The web interface, the admin UI for your cloud servers is very, very slow most of the time.

DRAWBACK 4: And that is certainly a big failure... I want to share my AMI's!!!

So, for all of you, Cloud Users with average needs, the best of it is that you don't have to take my word for it, go give it a try and decide for yourself, it will cost you just 1,5 cents.

This post was writen after reading these...

http://blog.schicks.net/2009/rackspace-vs-amazon/comment-page-1/#comment-33

http://www.catalyzed.org/2009/07/cloud-servers-for-your-perl-app-amazons-ec2-vs-mosso.html