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Cloud Servers™ vs. Amazon EC2
Cloud Servers™ vs. a Typical Server
Cloud Servers™ vs. Cloud Sites
Posterous considered Amazon's EC2, but chose Rackspace instead. Here's why.
Posterous, the popular blogging service, is the dead simple way to post everything. You make posts by sending email.
"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."- Sachin Agarwal, Posterous, Founder
Head to Head: Why Rackspace Cloud Servers™ for Linux works for Posterous
and Managed Cloud customers.
Support
Amazon EC2
To receive 24x7x365 support for Amazon EC2, you pay the greater of $400 per month or 10% (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.
With our core service level (free with Cloud Servers), customers get:
- 24x7x365 Chat/Phone/Ticket Support
- Access to The Rackspace Cloud Control Panel
- 100% Network Uptime Guarantee
- 100% HVAC/Power Uptime Guarantee
- Access to our forums and online resources, and much more
The Cloud Servers™ with a managed service level option extends our world-class managed services from our Managed Hosting offering to the Rackspace Cloud. This offer provides an additional level of support on Cloud Servers, which includes monitoring, operating system and application infrastructure layer support, and technical guidance.
Third Party Software Support
Amazon EC2
Amazon does not provide support for third party software even if customers purchase the highest level of support.
Cloud Servers
The Cloud Servers™ with a managed service level option gives our customers support for a number of third party software including:
- Linux operating system distributions(e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, etc.)
- Microsoft Windows operating system images
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Apache
- MySQL
- .Net/IIS (Windows)
Admin Level Troubleshooting
Amazon EC2
Amazon Support will not log in to a customer’s EC2 server to help its customers fix a problem.
Cloud Servers
If requested by a Cloud Servers™ with a managed service level customer, Rackspace Cloud support techs will log in to a customer’s Cloud Server to help fix a problem.
Persistence
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. Data persistence (not server persistence) can be added with Amazon EBS; however, EBS adds additional cost and complexity.
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 becomes degraded, we will restart and/or migrate your Cloud Server for you. A failure doesn’t mean that your Cloud Server goes away.
Server Sizes
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 Standard Instances start at 1.7 GB, so if your workload requires fewer resources, you are stuck paying for much more than you need. Amazon recently introduced Micro Instances (starting at 613 MB) for customers needing CPU burst capabilities.
Cloud Servers
We provide a wide variety of Cloud Server sizes, starting at 256 MB and going up to 30 GB. Cloud Servers™ can be resized to scale without any reinstallation.
Hybrid Hosting
Amazon EC2
Amazon only offers part of the answer, with only cloud solutions. Amazon VPC is a service offering to connect a company’s infrastructure to Amazon’s cloud; however, Amazon does not offer hosting on dedicated/managed servers.
Cloud Servers
Depending on your needs, you can get the best of both worlds with a combination of cloud and dedicated servers with our RackConnect™ solution. The best configuration for your business may span more than one platform. By mixing-and-matching compute platforms, Rackspace can help create the optimal compute solution for your business. Why settle when you can have both under one roof from Rackspace?
CPU Scheduling
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 instances have a capped CPU. If additional CPU capacity is required, you need to launch another instance. Amazon recently introduced Micro Instances which can be added (at an additional cost) for extra CPU resources.
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.
Compute Power
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 US-based Cloud Servers™ is, on average, more than two times more powerful than comparable Amazon EC2 servers.
Disk I/O
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 US-based Cloud Servers™ have a higher disk throughput than comparable Amazon EC2 servers.
IP Addresses
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.
Open Philosophy
Amazon EC2
Amazon has not embraced an open-source approach for cloud interoperability.
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.
In 2010, Rackspace became a founding member of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.
Why BuySellAds.com ditched their hardware to embrace the cloud.
BuySellAds.com is an advertising marketplace for small- to medium-sized website owners and publishers.
"Here’s the problem we had: we just couldn't get physical servers built fast enough. We got really tired of dealing with hardware and contracts."- Todd Garland, Founder, BuySellAds.com
Head to Head: Why Rackspace Cloud Servers™ work for BuySellAds.com.
Getting Servers Online
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 30 GB. Cloud Servers™ can be resized to scale up or down without any reinstallation.
Turning Servers On & Off
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.
Resizing Servers
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.
Cloning Servers
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.
Cloud Servers™ are the right product for Razorfish. Are they right for you?
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 Cloud Servers™ because we trust Rackspace with our business."- Ray Velez, Razorfish, CTO
Head to Head: How Razorfish chooses between Cloud Servers™ and Cloud Sites.
Root Access vs. Full Support
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.
Scalability & Redundancy
Each site we add to 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 30 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.
Security
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.
