jread

This is cool, but not earth shattering. It is essentially a management stack/abstraction layer/deployment tool on top of existing AWS services: EC2, CloudWatch, load balancing, route 53, autoscaling, AMIs. It is a PaaS sort of... but single-tenant and not in the same sense as a multi-tenant, higher level PaaS like AppEngine or Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk gives you flexibility (full root access - do whatever you want), but with that comes more responsibility from a management perspective, and more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.

+1 for apigee - we just migrated our web services and the stats, graphing and real-time debugger are excellent. Migration was super easy.

There are some distinguishing factors between IaaS clouds and VPS: paygo pricing (VM & bandwidth), API, self-service automated provisioning, no term commitments, scale-up/down (CPU, memory), VM imaging/cloning/templating, off instance storage. Some VPS providers like Linode, Slicehost, RimuHosting, etc. do offer a few cloud like features, but I wouldn't put them on the same playing field as EC2. If you don't need the additional flexibility and features of cloud, Linode is an excellent VPS provider.

There is also a big difference between PaaS cloud services like AppEngine, Azure and Heroku which require your application to fit within a particular mold (programming language, packaging, deployment), and IaaS cloud providers which offer you the full flexibility of root access to a dedicated server.

Let's add to this hypothetical... assuming a similar distribution of wealth as in the US and these 10 men had a total wealth of $1000. The top 2 would hold $425/each, the next 2 $50, the following 4 around $10, and the remaining 4 $2.25.

Looks like they've been down for about 14.5 hours currently: http://reports.panopta.com/cloudharmony/server/57551

MaxCDN and HDDN are offering discounts to existing customers looking to migrate. http://admin.simplecdn.com

Here are my own availability stats for Linode this year. We use Panopta to monitor each data center. All are within the SLA:

Dallas - 99.951% Newark - 99.969% London - 99.986% Fremont - 99.989% Atlanta - 99.995%

From status page: Initial indications are pointing towards another power outage. We are now working on bringing Linodes up as soon as possible. We will continue to post updates as we have more information.

http://status.linode.com

For what it is worth, we've had 99.998% uptime for static files on appengine - not using datastore or any other features (about 11 minutes of legitimate outages the past year).

During the same time period we've had 100% uptime for m1.small servers in EC2's US East and West regions, 99.989% uptime for EU West and 99.997% for APAC.

http://cloudharmony.com/status

I ran about 100 performance benchmarks on this new cluster compute instance and published results on our blog. It uses Nehalem X5570 with 16 hyper-threaded cores (8 physical), HVM, and 10 Gbps non-blocking network for the EBS volume. Out of 134 different virtual and bare-metal cloud servers I've benchmarked from EC2, Linode, Rackspace and other vendors, the EC2 cluster instance is the fastest in almost every category (CPU, disk IO, encoding, database, others).

http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/09/benchmarking-of-ec2s-new-c...

We've been using their Smart Javascript Platform (based on SpiderMonkey) for the past year. They are supposed to be migrating that platform to Node.js soon. The last outage we had was 236 days ago. Our current uptime for the past year is 99.968%. We also began using Smart Machines 3 months ago in Emeryville, CA and Andover, MA data centers and so far have 99.999% availability on those.

http://www.joyent.com/technology/smartplatform/

More benchmark results (in a UI) for Rackspace Cloud, EC2 and others are available here:

http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks (click on the 'View benchmark results' link on the bottom left)

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.

What reseller are you using? We were using VPS.net, but they informed us last week that Akamai had terminated their reselling contract and they were migrating users to Level3.

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.

This is true, generally all Rackspace Cloud servers perform about the same in terms of CPU and disk IO, so the small Rackspace instances will outperform small EC2 instances. However, they don't scale well and on the high end, they under-perform relative to comparable EC2 instance. Here is some sample data validating this (these web service links will provide XML formatted benchmark results):

1GB Rackspace vs EC2 Micro - CPU Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI...

1GB Rackspace vs EC2 Micro - IO Performance (using EC2 EBS): http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI...

16GB Rackspace vs EC2 cc.4xlarge - CPU Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI...

16GB Rackspace vs EC2 cc.4xlarge - IO Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI...

Another distinguishing factor between Rackspace Cloud and EC2 or Linode are bandwidth caps. Rackspace limits outbound public network throughput to 10mbps for 256mb instances to 70mbps for 16gb instances. EC2 and Linode both provide an uncapped GigE Internet uplink for instances of any size. http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Frequently_...

Rackspace Cloud used to have the upper hand on smaller sized instances. This is no longer the case with EC2's new 640mb micro instance at about $8/mo reserve. Not top performer, but it gets the job done for lower traffic servers.

I'm not sure there is any proof Rackspace Cloud is any more secure than EC2. AWS offers a Virtual Private Data Center service (VPC) which is highly secure. Rackspace Cloud has nothing like that. AWS also offers firewall management functionality which Rackspace Cloud does not. Amazon.com is run out of the same data centers as AWS.

<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.

CPU is a major bottleneck for Rackspace Cloud. All instance sizes get the same 4 cores and about the same compute resources. CPU performance is roughly the same on a 1GB cloud server as an 8GB cloud server, you are just paying for more memory. Rackspace also uses ONLY Opteron 2374 2.20 GHz processors. EC2 on the other hand offers linear CPU performance improvement on larger sized instances. EC2 also uses a heterogenous hardware ranging from Opteron 2218 or Xeon E5430 for m1 instances; Xeon E5410 for c1 instances; Xeon X5550 for m2 instances and Xeon X5570 (hyper-threaded to 16 cores) for the cluster compute instances. EBS on the cluster instance is also much faster than local disk IO in the Rackspace Cloud based on testing I've done (due to non-blocking 10G network). Here are a couple of references for this:

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma... http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...

4 kids and 1 year into a startup here. It is not easy. If you don't have the support of your wife (and you want to stay married), don't even try. You have to prioritize very well, and force yourself to take breaks for your family. You don't want to be absent for a year or more of your kids life, you'll never get that time back. You'll also need a more income or savings to cover basic expenses. It is a very difficult balancing act.

We've been monitoring a heroku instance for the past 8 months. Our current instance uptime is 99.953% (about 200 minutes of downtime). Of the 76 services we monitor, Heroku is #64.

http://cloudharmony.com/status

We've spent about a year collecting data and developing these web services. I'd be very interested in feedback and suggestions from the HN community.

We tried using SimpleDB initially for a startup. We store a lot of numerical data. When it came time to actually query this data and do anything meaningful with it we ran into a lot of issues because all values are stored as untyped strings (comparison and ordering is always lexicographic). There are ways around this using zero-padding, but they are ugly and difficult. The SimpleDB query language is also limiting if you are accustomed to SQL and relational data structures. In the end it just wasn't the right fit and we reverted to an RDBMS.

You could also try PayPal's website payments standard which offers similar recurring payment functionality and identical transaction pricing. Customer's aren't required to have a PayPal account to purchase through it either.

Both of these services only offer checkout capabilities. They don't offer product/subscription management or other advanced features like dunning which gateway wrapper services like Chargify, Recurly, Spreedly and ChettarGetter offer.

If you are bootstrapped and need low cost recurring payments capabilities here are a few fully outsourced and PCI compliant services you could consider:

PayPal Website Payments Standard: 2.9% + $0.30/trans https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...

Google Subscription Payments (experimental): 2.9% + $0.30/trans http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko...

Aria SubscriptionPlus (via PayPal partnership): Free trial, then $40/mo https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...

Chargify just sent an email offering existing customers a "Bootstrapping" plan. $39/mo for up to 100 customers.

http://grasshopper.com/email_assets/chargify-bootstrapper.ht...

I'll second dynadot. I switched from godaddy a few years ago and could not be happier. Website is lean and fast, domain lookups are super fast, and checkout is a simple 1 minute process.

I'm having the same dilemma with a SaaS startup. Up until now we've been using Quickbooks online's gateway and recurring payments capabilities, but the process of setting up new payments is manual and tedious and we want to go with more of a self serve model.

We are considering Braintree and Authorize.net's ARB. Another option is PayPal's Website Payments Pro gateway service. Here is a comparison of the two:

PayPal Website Payments Pro w/Recurring Payments: Discount Rate: 2.9% $0-3k; 2.5% $3k-10k; 2.2% 10k+ Transaction Fee: $0.30 Monthly Fee: $30/mo Recurring Billing Fee: $30/mo Monthly Minimum: $0

Braintree: Discount Rate: 2.29% qualified; 2.89% non-qualified Transaction Fee: $0.30 Monthly Fee: $35/mo Recurring Billing Fee: $0.10/transaction + $20/mo and $0.01/card for the Vault service Monthly Minimum: $75 (does not include monthly fee)

Another option for using a CDN that will let you maintain better control and outage visibility, is to sign up for a paygo CDN account yourself. GoGrid and Speedyrails resell Edgecast CDN and Softlayer resells Internap CDN both of which are very good performing CDNs with both origin and pop pull models. The cost for these services would only be about $0.57 per 100k jQuery hits (assuming 24KB minified version is used).