Ask HN: Why did github choose Rackspace over Amazon EC2?

5 points·jabo··5 comments

I've read a ton of articles comparing Rackspace cloud and AWS, but I was wondering what github's reasons were to go with Rackspace.

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This was already answered on quora by PJ Hyett, GitHub Co-Founder:

"IO performance is essential to our business (handling an enormous amount of disk operations) and EBS wasn't nearly as fast as bare metal when we ran benchmarks prior to moving to Rackspace."

(from http://www.quora.com/GitHub/Why-did-GitHub-use-Rackspace-ove...)

While price most probably played an important role too, as indicated by EngineYard, its former host: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-and-github-t...

I suspect in large part because Rackspace are much better at marketing, or were quicker off the mark than Amazon. They realise that an "en vogue" name like github looks very good hosted with them, and are likely offering a big discount in exchange for the "Powered by..." banner at the bottom of every github page.

We do the same for firms wanting to host with http://bigv.io/ though I'd not imagine github would want a UK-based host.

Well, they explained it clearly in blog post: https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace

Thanks for the link, but in that article they mention why they moved from Engine Yard to Rackspace. My question was why they didn't move to ec2 from Engine Yard.

I would imagine their bullet point about flexibility and direct hardware access is why Rackspace won over EC2. I've used both ends of Rackspace (colo and cloud) and would imagine it would be simple to utilize both services under a common support account (which is Rackspace's big upsell: their support). EC2 doesn't even have a colo option or partner so you'd have to roll your own solution. Better to take advantage of the integration considdering price is close enough.

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