

Rackspace (via Mosso) to Launch Cloud Servers at 1.5 cents/hour ($10.95/month) Monday - mdasen
http://blog.mosso.com/2009/03/breaking-news-mosso-the-rackspace-cloud-announces-availability-of-cloud-servers-and-more/

======
melvinram
Just had a chat with a great rep from Rackspace named Will Conway:

SUMMARY:

* Same as SliceHost except pricing is hourly, instead of monthly

* 1GB Slice = $43.80/mo

* Upgrade/downgrade whenever you want

* For questions, contact Will at 210-312-5181 or wconway@mosso.com

* You get root SSH access, just like SliceHost

FULL THING: ===========

Will: Hi welcome to Mosso the Rackspace cloud. How can I help you? May I also
get your name and email address just in case we get disconnected?

you: Hello

you: Melvin Ram, melvin@volcanicmarketing.com

you: Is Cloud Servers the same as slicehost?

Will: Nice to meet you Melvin

Will: it's a little different

Will: so with slicehost you're locked in to bandwidth

Will: cloud servers is on a utility model with bandwidth

Will: slicehost you're paying montly

Will: monthly*

Will: cloud servers is hourly

you: I currently have a 1gig slice with slice host and it's way under the
bandwidth limits... how much would that cost with Cloud Servers? And will I
get the same type of root access?

Will: you will get the same root access

Will: 1 GB (40GB Storage) $0.06 hourly, $43.80 monthly you: can I upgrade a
server to a larger server and then shrink back down at a later time?

Will: sure, and you wont have to reupload anything just like with slicehost
you: Will this be replacing slicehost?

Will: nope

Will: you'll still have slicehost if you want it

Will: this is just a little extra : )

you: Is there any reason someone would want to stay with SliceHost and not
migrate to this?

you: especially since I'm assuming both system will have access to exact same
hardware and network

Will: simply a comfort factor I think

Will: if you already know it

Will: but to me cloud servers is going to be the way to go

you: it's almost half the cost for exact same thing... a little pain for 200%
ROI makes sense

you: anyway, thanks for the info

you: I'll be switching soon

Will: great, thanks for keeping it in the family : )

you: I was thinking of switching to heroku but I might just think twice

you: heroku is based on the AWS system

Will: Great, that's what we were going for

Will: Booooo AWS

Will: we're faster anyway : )

Will: and we specialize in hosting not books....

Will: So I see you're in marketing

Will: do you have some rather large projects that you may need this for, or
just to run day to day stuff

you: small stuff for now

Will: cool, just checking : )

Will: I'll get that email out to you

you: Right now, the main app is www.BrainBankhq.com

you: its in it's infancy right now

you: Zero paying clients

you: but a lot of people promising to start using it once I add ability to
charge people for the content.

Will: gotta start somewhere right

you: Yep... they'll all be membership-based websites so I'm assuming that a
few of them will turn to be much better than most of them... so it's just a
matter of seeing where it goes.

you: And just refining it so it's simple

Will: so what's this for, kind of link Junto with Ben Franklin?

you: huh?

you: reading about it on wikipedia... gemme me a sec

Will: Junto was a group that eventually evolved into the University of
Philadelphia...basically a think tank

you: Well some of the membership sites may turn into that but it wasn't the
original intent.

you: Originally, I wanted to create an app that I could use to take down notes
for my chemistry class and sell it future students.

Will: ah, yes that would be very useful

you: yea, but I didnt know how to do credit card processing so I made it so it
would be offer free content

you: I figured it would be a lead-gen tool

you: content creators don't like that idea

you: Or at least I haven't explained it well enough for them to like the idea.

Will: I'm sure you'll get through to them : )

you: anyway, I've come across enough people who want to create membership-
based content sites that it makes sense to give it a try to go that direction

you: Btw, did you get a chance to send over that stuff?

Will: have you looked at cloud servers to host this

Will: it's a little more scaleable

you: It's on Slicehost for now

Will: just sent it

you: I'll move it here soon

you: You don't mind if I share it with a few friends to pass on the new, do
ya?

Will: not at all

Will: feel free to give them my email address if they have follow up questions

Will: or they can call me direct at 210-312-5181

Will: my name is Will Conway

you: Gotcha! Thanks Will!

Will: my pleasure

you: Wait, one more Q

you: It obviously comes with SSH, right?

Will: correct

Will: you'll have full command line access

you: Just like SliceHost

Will: you bet

Will: Slicehost is the foundation of cloud servers so you'll find that it's
all very similar

you: Gotcha

~~~
rw
You clearly are in marketing!

~~~
melvinram
haha I'm not quiet sure how to take that, so I'll assume it's a compliment.
Thanks!

------
hbien
After reading two paragraphs, I wanted to know how many times they used the
word "cloud" on that page. It's 72: <http://twitpic.com/21an7>

~~~
patio11
Sometimes I wonder if people are perhaps drinking a little too much of the
cloud KoolAid. This is one of those times.

I had somebody from Microsoft once tell me, in apparent seriousness, that I
should cloudify my program. Because it would offer me unprecedented
scalability and uptime, and let my customers access their data from anywhere.

 _sigh_ You see this tool right here? It is called a hammer. It is useful for
many things. You see this problem right here? It is an ingrown toe-nail.
Please do not attempt to fix the ingrown toe-nail with the hammer. It will not
work out well.

------
asnyder
It would be nice if they had a comparison document detailing the differences
between the Cloud Servers and their Slicehost service. I currently have a
handful of slices, all of which might benefit from these offerings. However, I
know with the Slicehost offerings I have persistent storage, bandwidth, etc.
However, I don't normally use all my bandwidth or storage.

It would also be nice to know if they have any details regarding whether this
will be integrated into Slicehost's Control Panel, or products, to allow
easier migration, scaling, etc.

~~~
mdasen
Well, I think the idea is that those details are coming on monday. But there
are some details that we can know now since Cloud Servers is mostly just
Slicehost combined with Mosso/Rackspace's support/billing channels. So,
they'll be Xen instances with persistent storage. Right now the bandwidth
question is up in the air since the site doesn't specify. Given the pricing,
I'd have to assume some bandwidth would be included. At $700, their 15.5GB
server wouldn't look so nice against an $800 slice that came with 2,000GB of
bandwidth (which would cost $400 at $0.20/GB).

They'll probably be integrating this with the Mosso control panel.

EDIT: So, talking with the Mosso support, bandwidth is not included and it
will cost 22cents outgoing. Makes the pricing look a lot less appealing
against Amazon's EC2 - especially since Slicehost's previous key (persistent
storage) is negated by EBS.

Mosso's live help is answering any questions you have and they seem decently
knowledgeable. The information doesn't seem to be embargoed at all by
Rackspace.

------
ssanders82
Word of warning: I used their $100/mo server cloud as my host for a while, but
repeated downtime issues forced me to leave.

~~~
jonmc12
Yea, we've had problems too - I've consistently benchmarked their cloud sites
servers with a load time 5-8x slower than other hosts.

~~~
pj
The difference is, other hosts will crash under load and you'll lose all your
requests. Mosso is like a train and other hosts are motorcycles. It's slower
but can haul way more tonnage.

------
timf
They say "click here for details" but it has no more information,
unfortunately: <http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp>

My guess is that this is going to be a pretty small box meant to pique
people's interest and get them looking at the price sheet, something like 64MB
or 128MB RAM.

Personally I have a use for changing numbers of many small nodes like that,
dependent on the bandwidth situation at least. Getting things down to this
small of a slice means you can really optimize certain tasks.

~~~
streety
The details are:

Here are the different plans available along with pricing per hr.

    
    
      * 256 MB (20GB Storage) $0.015
      * 512 MB (40GB Storage) $0.03
      * 1 GB (60GB Storage) $0.06
      * 2 GB (80GB Storage) $0.12
      * 4 GB (160GB Storage) $0.24
      * 8 GB (320GB Storage) $0.48
      * 15.5 GB (620GB Storage) $0.96

bandwidth will run $0.08 per GB for the incoming and $0.20 per GB for the
outgoing

OSs available:

    
    
      * Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
      * Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) LTS
      * Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
      * Gentoo 2008.0
      * Centos 5.2
      * Fedora 10
      * Arch 2007.08
    

The folks behind the live chat aren't keeping these details secret. I've no
idea why they aren't on the web page.

~~~
davepeck
At first blush, this looked far cheaper than EC2.

But, actually, it's the 2GB Mosso machine (at 12 cents/hour) that's most
comparable to the EC2 Small Instance (at 10 cents/hour). The EC2 Small
Instance has twice the local storage, but a little less RAM.

So, they're roughly comparable, with Amazon perhaps coming out a tad ahead in
price.

That said, I think offering S (1GB), XS (512MB), and XXS (256MB) sizes is a
great idea that could be a solid differentiator for Mosso.

~~~
moe
Don't forget that amazon's local storage is volatile and _dog slow_ , too.

So all in all, if those prices are correct, this seems like a very competitive
offering. I for one would seriously consider to trade in the hassles of
maintaining those AMI images for a few bucks of monthly markup.

But on the other hand: Amazon is a battle-tested platform by now, whereas we
have yet to see how Mosso performs. Also just today Amazon revealed their new
pricing model where you can get away with $48/month for a small instance if
you commit for a year (or even $36/month if you commit for 3 years).

Anyways, in summary I welcome every new contender to this space. Choice is
good.

~~~
timf
Amazon also has EBS which is fast and should be very reliable. Slicehost (also
acquired by Rackspace) has RAID 10 for the images and is pretty good.

Still hard to tell what they're offering here.

~~~
moe
EBS is not the same as having fast and _persistent_ local storage, though.

The whole volatility of AMI images is a big burden.

You can't just make changes to your images as you go - you can't even snapshot
a running image into a new AMI.

Instead you have to port all changes back to a local copy of your AMI and re-
upload that AMI for updates - which is a cumbersome and lengthy process.

To add insult to injury you have to maintain _two_ AMI-images if you want to
take full advantage of both small and large instances. One 32bit and one 64bit
AMI is required in that case.

Ofcourse there are workarounds and our AMI-images are, by now, setup in a way
where they provide only a bare, baseline system that updates itself upon boot.
Still, this remains one of the biggest pain points with EC2 and will drive
many users away when viable alternatives become available.

~~~
timf
Yeah, I've been through all this too. Sounds like you want something beyond
"ec2-bundle-instance" which will bundle your running instance but won't
snapshot the VM from "underneath" as it's running (EBS snapshots can do that
though). Another way we address issues like this is to create VMs on a local
cluster (with Nimbus which is a local EC2 API compatible service that supports
persistent storage) and transfer them to EC2 for big launches of the "finished
product."

~~~
moe
_Yeah, I've been through all this too. Sounds like you want something beyond
"ec2-bundle-instance" which will bundle your running instance but won't
snapshot the VM from "underneath" as it's running (EBS snapshots can do that
though)._

Sort of. What I'd really like is a _ec2-bundle-instance_ that works near
instantly. As I understand it amazon copies our AMIs around their clusters
anyways - but insists on mounting them read-only.

I'd like a flag to my _ec2-run-instances_ that causes the AMI image to be
mounted as read/write. Make the i/o dog slow if you must (it already is,
anyways) but let me work directly on the image and _make sure my changes
persist across reboots for this particular instance_. That requires them to
make a copy my AMI-file on their server for that particular instance - so bill
me extra, thanks.

With those mechanics in place I'd imagine an equivalent to _ec2-bundle-
instance_ that works near instantly on such r/w-AMIs would be possible. It'd
only have to copy the modified image back to s3.

The take-home would be that we get a way to perform and test (hence the
reboot) AMI-changes much more quickly than is possible now.

~~~
timf
I think ec2-bundle-instance does something much like what you're asking for.

EC2 VMs are not mounted read-only. They are reconstructed from S3 and mounted
read/write as a local file on the Xen node.

The changes to this file (your instance's storage) are saved across reboots
when you type 'reboot' or use the external ec2-reboot-instances command.

It's just that the terminate operation does not copy the changed file back to
replace the AMI that was launched (it would be quite limiting if it did that).

ec2-bundle-instance is a program that will bundle a running instance into a
new AMI upon its next reboot. So it requires a reboot and is not like a live
lvm-snapshot which is what you will get from EBS snapshots.

------
pantsd
The existence of a low end instance in addition to some higher end instance
availablity options is pretty awesome, this makes it cheap enough for
something which you might only really need VPS level availability to make
sense to build on top of their platform and then if you need a bunch of
instances all at once ok to fire up. They have quotes on the site like "I
couldn't even find Amazon's phone number" which seem a bit miss-leading
(Amazon simply charges for phone support), but yay for competition :)

------
bcx
Any word on whether these will be 32 bit or 64 instances. Slicehost's ram is
far less "efficient" than linode, and you only really need 64bit for
addressing ram anyway.

~~~
listic
What do you mean by "Slicehost's ram is far less "efficient" than linode"?

~~~
moe
He probably means that slicehost only offers 64bit VMs which causes some
memory overhead.

------
chiffonade
This cloud stuff sounds great!

I can't wait to use it in 5 years when it's reliable.

