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Comment by teoruiz | Hacker News Reader

We have most of our workload running on Rackspace Cloud Servers (UK) and the more improvements AWS make, the more overpriced and ridiculously underperforming the Rackspace offer becomes:

Underperforming: I don't get why the bigger Rackspace Cloud Servers don't get more CPU cores, just a bigger share of the original 4 cores on the host server. This might look fine but at the end I just want more processes (PHP threads) running at the same time.

Overpriced: The pricing is really high for Cloud Servers. I'm paying around £460 a month for a 16GB RAM Cloud Server (4 cores, 620GB (!) disk). For around €448 I have a Rackspace dedicated server with 48GB RAM, 2 x 6 (modern) cores and a 480GB RAID10 array.

I'm actually switching most of our workload to dedicated hardware, it's less cool but it's just cheaper and faster, in this case.

NB: We tried AWS but the MySQL IO performance, either in EC2+EBS or RDS, was not enough for us.

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I've been told by my Rackspace rep that they're working towards moving away from VMWare and onto something else (based on their Open Stack system).

Supposedly (and take that with a grain of salt since this information is a few layers removed) the current VMWare based cloud they have is limiting how flexible they can be about their offering, i.e. every instance price level just doubles everything and all but the 32G instance has 4 virtual cores. Once they move to the new system supposedly you'll be able to mix & match things more. Maybe their current cloud really requires homogenous hardware, I don't know.

As for modern cores: Rackspace is somewhat conservative about what hardware they offer, though you can get special order. My desktop i7 2600K has single-thread performance that's essentially twice of the quad-core quad-CPU Xeon in the "real" server. A place like Hetzner -- http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... -- offers a € 49 server using that.

As for AWS, isn't the way to "fix" that to use essentially striped EBS volumes?

That's not quite right. Rackspace currently uses the Xen Hypervisor for public Cloud, not VMWare. The new Cloud Servers (Nova) is based on the open source OpenStack Compute (http://openstack.org/projects/compute/) code base. The new Cloud Servers is in public beta right now for people to try out (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-cloud-servers-powere...).

The new Cloud Servers will have much greater flexibility and a better feature set. It will help solve many issues that customers have with the current offerings. That information will be coming out over the next couple of months, but since we are only about two-weeks different from the OpenStack nova code base, you can always look there for a preview.

Rackspace does offer a VMWare based private cloud (http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/private_cloud/) for customers who want virtualization, but on their own dedicated hardware. VMWare is not used for public cloud (as far as I know).

Obvious Disclosure: I work at Rackspace and this is to the best of my knowledge.

Hm, those dedicated prices are quite good, better than I'm paying at SoftLayer. Did you have to push very hard on the sales side to get that price? Have you been happy with reliability and support?

Not really, no. I had to push for the bandwidth prices, but not for the hardware. These are the detailed specs of one of those €448/month servers (Sep'11 prices) :

- DELL PowerEdge R710

- 2 x Six Core Intel Xeon E5645 2.4GHz, 12M cache

- 4 x 300GB SAS 15K RPM Drive (RAID10 controller with 256MB cache)

- 48GB DELL RAM

I would say their reliability is great on the dedicated side (their Cloud reliability is just OK) and their "fanatical" support is really good, as they advertise.

Edit: just to clarify these are Rackspace UK (LON3) prices.

Thanks for the clarification! Was any bandwidth included in that price/setup? If not, that might be the reason for the difference.

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