Hacker News Reader

Comment by jread | Hacker News Reader

<quote>Amazon has a CDN and servers distributed globally. This is important to Mixpanel as websites all over the world are sending us data. There’s nothing like this on Rackspace.</quote>

Actually, Rackspace cloud offers CDN services with Cloud Files through Limelight, although it does not support some features that CloudFront does like CName and streaming.

View on HN

A CDN is probably the easiest service provider to switch. We've tried Panther, Voxel, Cloudfront and use Edgecast. It's just a matter of changing some CNAMEs.

But not physical servers which is really what I am referring to.

Rackspace Cloud has data centers in Texas and Illinois. However, they don't let you choose (your account is assigned to one data center at the time of creation). EC2 certain offers a lot more flexibility in this regard with EC2 data center regions in California, Virginia, Ireland and Singapore. I spoke with Rackspace at Interop a few weeks ago and they told me they are working on expanding to additional data centers including an international data center very soon and offering choice.

You can "choose" insofar as you can email support and they can manually change what data-center your next VM and all subsequent ones will be built in. It really should be exposed through the API, but the people who write the customer-facing API haven't done it.

That is not the story I got when I contacted support and asked if I could deploy a VM specifically to the Chicago cloud. Rackspace's support told me this was not possible an I'd have to setup an entirely new account in order to deploy to that data center.

Well, I guess that's one way of doing it. :(

I wrote the code in question, though. It wasn't supposed to be an _advertised_ option, but when I wrote it it was supposed to be a usable one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com