Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Seems no one here so far has mentioned Rackspace.

Let's start by saying that DO has fewer features for a complex deployment:

No load balancing,

no private subnets,

(IIRC) no IPv6 at the moment.

No "cloud files" or S3 equivalent,

the scaling isn't as automatic as RAX or AWS can provide.

DO can't host Windows (which still matters for many existing operations, don't fool yourself).

RAX gives more information and granularity on its VM levels.

Finally, support. RAX can do managed services, dedicated advisors, IT support and servers for sensitive data. DO has none of this.

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There are two things DO does that I appreciate (though neither concept is new):

* $5 hosting. RAX is a minimum of $16/mo now, for the same VM strength.

* Application deployments. The ability to one-click deploy Wordpress/Gitlab/etc. is pretty damned awesome.

DO is great for technically competent people who don't need a lot of infrastructure, or otherwise have a consistent level of server/bandwidth requirements for their servers.

Agreed, all of these features prevent me from using DO beyond weekend projects. But these features are all on their to-do list. They are tackling them with the most requested features first. BTW, they just added Private Networking in NY2 (maybe more by now).

It is in all of their new data centers (NY2, AMS2, Singapore 1).

I like DO for backup/secondary purposes, but until they allow more than 1 public IP per droplet (even for a fee!), I won't use them for any serious production.

I find it amusing that their servers aren't much more expensive than what some companies charge for an additional IP.

I moved some servers from Linode to Rackspace, mainly to consolidate billing since we already had regular dedicated servers there.

I imagine the change was a lot like going from DO to AWS - much more complicated, but at the time Rackspace had only owned Slicehost for a few years and the interface was awful and the setup was confusing with 1st gen and 2nd gen cloud servers and it was just a mess.

I like the Rackspace cloud offering a lot too. We use it exclusively for our business. I see Rackspace as being in the middle of the spectrum if DO is at the bottom and AWS is at the top in terms of more features/higher price.

Also the VPS up-time we have experienced on over 20 nodes for the past 3 years on Rackspace cloud has been pretty great, all things considered.

Every time I look at rack space it looks phenomenally expensive.

As far as I can tell it's 5 times the cost of digital ocean.

It does seem to be. We are relatively small, and admittedly have a whole bunch of data in S3, but aside from that, our $10K/mo at Rackspace (primarily VMs, some load balancing) is looking to go down to about $6K/month at AWS when we port across 40 or so VMs (then we also don't have to deal with $4K/mo of S3 data transfer, too).

See, I don't get why anyone doing that simply wouldn't just go dedicated.

You know you need it, so why pay a huggggeeeeeee premium and get relatively poor performance compared to dedicated for on demand VM services?

I get the impression a significantly smaller subset of people using AWS/Rackspace/Azure should actually be using them.

Obviously I know nothing about what you're doing, so it may be that you have a perfectly good use case.

Definitely true. I've actually only been with this company five weeks as their Ops guy, so these are questions I need to get answers too - the founder freely admits Rackspace was his first choice due to good history. But AWS is probably a better fit for us, so I'm doing due diligence on all that. Dedicated is probably not going to work for us at least initially. But definitely worth investigation too.

> RAX is a minimum of $16/mo now, for the same VM strength

I don't see this on their site (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/). Minimum pricing there is $29.20/mo for a 1gb instance.

They hide it (which I think is foolish). They in fact have a pre-Openstack infrastructure where 256M instance is $11.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/pricing/

Awesome.

Actually Rackspace does have a deployments option under servers that can deploy Wordpress, GitLab, and others. It even handles some of the configuration details right out of the box.

> * $5 hosting. RAX is a minimum of $16/mo now, for the same VM strength.

You should start with this. How are they even comparable if one is more than thrice the price of the other?

But the simplicity (less features) and lower cost is exactly why people choose DO over rackspace. Probably the easier referral program too.

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