

Ask HN: Can you recommend a Cloud host to us? - Scott_MacGregor

We are considering either Rackspace or Amazon for cloud service. Does anyone have any experiences or recommendations good or bad for either.<p>Any problems with slow speed or outages, things of that nature.<p>Comments both positive and negative would be appreciated.<p>Thanks,
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byoung2
I use all of Rackspace Cloud's offerings (Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers, Cloud
Files) and I've been satisfied so far. I also use GoGrid for more advanced
applications, as they offer free hardware load balancing and mountable cloud
storage.

I'm assuming you're interested in Cloud Servers vs Amazon EC2? Depending on
your usage (mainly bandwidth in/out), one or the other may work out slightly
cheaper, but for the most part they are about the same price (although with
Rackspace, support is free and very good). A huge advantage to Rackspace is
that the instances can be resized on the fly, and they allow bursting.

For example, a 2GB Cloud Server (based on server RAM) is 1/8th of a quad core
2.4GHz server, but that is a CPU floor, meaning that 1/8th of the server's
resources are guaranteed, but if you have a brief spike and there are
sufficient resources on the host, you can burst to 100% of 4 cores. With EC2,
you can never go above the allotted resources.

As far as outages go, Rackspace had some bad luck with their DFW datacenter
this year, but I wasn't affected. The SAT datacenter seems to be more stable.

------
jnaut
The answer is - "It depends", on a lot of parameters like: 1\. Do you need a
dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do? 2\. What are your avg
monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements
shall change of time. 3\. You want to customize you box's configuration before
u rent it? 4\. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more? 5\. Will you need
additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often? 6\. Do you
just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-
files(rackspace)? Many more ....

So I think if you describe you requirements and budget better, the suggestions
provided will be better.

About problems like low speed, outages, etc. Yes both have their own set of
problems, but still a more relevant answer can be given when you have
illustrated you requirements.

I have been using EC2,S3,SDB for one of my projects(last 4 months) and
Rackspace/Mosso cloudserver for another (last 3 months). Since the durations
are short I may not be able to explain everything, but will try my best. :-)

~~~
Scott_MacGregor
We will be looking for a cloud server that we can self administrate, vs. a
cloud site that the host administrates. The budget will be what it has to be
to get what we want and need.

1\. Q. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do?

A. Virtual on a shared box will do right now.

2\. Q. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And
how these requirements shall change of time.

A. Currently we are still in development, so these are still to be determined.
Part of our service will be serving video content.

3\. Q. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it?

A. Yes, we will need to mod apache and harden the OS.

4\. Q. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more?

A. Cash flow currently dictates monthly.

5\. Q. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How
often?

A. “Computational Nodes” as far a grid hosting no. I’m not a cloud expert but
if it is handled by the scalability of the cloud probably. How often would
still need to be determined.

6\. Q. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS,
cloud-files(rackspace)?

A. Yes, probably except for SQS.

Just a note: We are leaning towards RackSpace because of their connection with
LimeLight because of Limelight’s focus on video delivery to the end user.

~~~
jnaut
Most of you requirements except the need for SDB and S3 are well satisfied by
Rackspace. Rackspace is also coming up with a new feature, similar to S3
called cloud files. But no equivalent for SDB.

Since you are in development Rackspace's low end boxes (like 256M with 512
bursts, etc.)charged nominally for bandwidth will do fine. Whereas Amazon has
got fixed boxes with 2G or something as far as I remember, I took it like 5
months ago. For a dev box where there is no/not-much user traffic, a low end
shared box from Rackspace if a good option. Its highly efficient on the
budget. Once you have used it for dev phase you will have more knowledge and
confidence on what Rackspace can do and what not. So you can decide whether to
use it for prod or move over to something else.

Rackspace has got a monthly billing and anytime cancelling option. It works
fine on budget as well as it gives you control over things if they are going
beyond what you initially thought, as you can see the usage in real time (may
be a few hours late at max). They had a money back policy too, about 4 months
ago when I signed up, for the first month if the user is not satisfied.

About problems:

EC2: very less problems. But remember these are commodity hardware, measly
boxes, the moment you start too many process (if doing any mutli processing)
the box's response time mounts exponentially :-). Multi-threaded is fine.

S3 - have been using for storing images and haven't had a problem so far. You
have options to save your EC2 image to your S3 space regularly to keep backup
server images. That costs you in terms of the space required on S3.

SDB: I hope you are aware but will still iterate that this is a key-value
datastore, not relational. I will say it is very much in the works. It does a
lot good at most of the times, but lack of a group-by, only text data, only
lexicographic sort (which forces the user to put even numerical data in
special formats to sort on it), a bit ill defined mutli-valued attributes,
number of attributes allowed to put at each request and overall number of
attributes for a item are a few bumps in the road. But once you read the docs
and be regular with the AWS forums most of these get solved.

Rackspace cloud server: Only problem I have faced SSH is slow sometimes.

Rackspace cloudfiles: haven't used. But I know that you can automate your
cloud server backup to cloud files, that costs.

Again, as you mentioned LimeLight, that's another factor, that makes Rackspace
more suitable for you.

So I guess you best bet is to start off with Rackspace for now and see how it
goes.

Hope that answer helps.

------
moe
One thing to consider is that rackspace doesn't seem to have an EBS (elastic
block storage) equivalent. You can not mount any of their NAS offerings to a
cloud server.

This means a few things:

    
    
      1. Your cloud servers top out at 620G storage per 
         instance.
    
      2. You can not scale the storage separately from RAM/CPU.
         To get more storage you have to buy the more expensive
         instance types, even if you don't need the additional
         RAM/CPU.
     
      3. You can not increase throughput nor reliability by 
         doing a soft-raid over multiple mounted storage 
         devices.
    

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, this is the last info I got from
rackspace.

~~~
jbellis
True, but the reason Amazon created EBS is that on EC2 local instance storage
is transient, so they needed something nonvolatile but lower-level than S3.
Cloud Server's local storage is already nonvolatile and RAID-1'd.

/works for Rackspace

~~~
moe
Well, I really like Rackspace and would love to find an excuse to use them -
but this statement comes across as weaseling. :-)

What does it matter _why_ amazon introduced EBS here? It doesn't. What matters
is that this is a serious constraint on the Rackspace side.

You brought this up, so I'll take the chance to add that I really don't like
the way you spin this on your comparison page (under Bullet 01, no less):

[http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...](http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/compare)

Is Rackspace turning a Marketing-Company now?

A fair comparison would include EBS and the associated costs. EBS is an
integral part of the EC2 offering, just like your NAS options are an... Oh
wait, those don't work with your CloudServers.

The apple-to-oranges FUD you have there right now only leaves a bad taste in
the mouth of an educated, potential customer. Smoke & mirror tactics like that
are a big red flag ("Are they so insecure about their offering?").

~~~
jbellis
> What does it matter why amazon introduced EBS here? It doesn't.

Sure it does, because the reason is precisely that EBS is the only option for
non-volatile storage in the Amazon cloud. This comes free for nonvolatile
storage comes free with every Cloud Servers vm, up to the limits you
mentioned, instead of having to pay extra for EBS to get that feature.

All I was saying was this is a fine tradeoff for most users. No need to get
defensive. :)

~~~
moe
No idea how my statement could come across as defensive - the intention was
rather _offensive_. And I must say I'm quite disappointed by the response.

Sorry if I acome across like an angry nerd by now but a) that's what I am and
b) do you really think this is a good forum to play the smoke & mirrors game
in?

Many of us over here build systems like the ones you are selling. False claims
like "rackspace is giving their storage away for free" simply don't work for
us.

I feel insulted when reading bollocks like that. Why do you try to treat me
like an idiot?

The rackspace storage does ofcourse _not_ come "free". The cost was simply
factored into the base-fee.

Let's compare the largest instance where we can make a match, shall we:

    
    
       Monthly fee |  Rackspace 8G Instance | EC2 "Large"
      -------------+------------------------+-----------------
      Monthly Fee  |                $345.60 |         $288.00 
      640G Disk    |                $0.00   |          $64.00
      =============^========================+================
                                    $345.60 |         $352.00
    

Rackspace comes out ahead by a lousy $6.40 or 2%. That's your definition of
free, yes?

Want me to make that comparison with a reserved instance? Ah, thanks for
asking, I knew you wanted.

    
    
       Monthly fee |  Rackspace 8G Instance | "Large" reserved
      -------------+------------------------+-----------------
      Monthly Fee  |                $345.60 |         $162.00 
      640G Disk    |                $0.00   |          $64.00
      =============^========================+================
                                    $345.60 |         $226.00
    

Oops. By the means of a simple 1 year commitment EC2 suddenly comes out ahead
quite a worthwhile $119.60 or 35%.

And know what, one great thing we could use these $120 saved bucks for would
be to add 1.2T more storage! How's that? And what would the price for that be
at rackspace anyways? Oh sorry, I forget, 640G ought to be enough for
everybody...

Well, I'll stop already, you see where it's headed. :-)

For your own good, please refrain from bending facts the way you did above
when speaking to a technical audience. Unless having nerds like me pop out of
the wood and redact you in public is part of your marketing strategy...

------
shpxnvz
I've used and had good experience with both platforms. The only performance
issues I've ever had were with SimpleDB when it was in beta.

For support the nod would have to go to Rackspace, in my opinion. The two
times I've needed help I was talking to a real person in San Antonio within
twenty seconds or so, which beats a post in the AWS forums that might
eventually get answered from an employee if your lucky.

------
rgrieselhuber
Here's what I'm doing at the moment:

Slicehost for web server, backend processing and db. This allows me to scale
each major part individually. The processor agents store a bunch of stuff on
S3.

I'm probably going to change this to using the backend systems on Slicehost
just as schedulers and do the actual processing on EC2. The biggest concern
here is transferring the data back and forth. If Amazon provided functionality
identical to Slicehost at the same economics, I would switch in an instant.

------
fuzzmeister
Does anyone have any experiences with Rackspace Cloud Sites? Is it a good way
to get scalable hosting without worrying about provisioning new instances and
such?

~~~
izak30
Customer Support is good. Functionality is pretty meh. You have no SSH, no
SCP, no gzip.

We host on EC2 and it's been really cost effective, and everything that we've
needed EXCEPT multiple IPs to an instance. each instance can only have one IP,
and therefore one SSL certificate (until.....SSL tech in browsers catches up
with standards, and TLS is fully adopted in browsers and apache)

~~~
lrm242
This is indeed a problem. The only solutions I've found are to use a wild card
certificate if you just need to secure subdomains, or to use a SANS UCC
certificate that allows multiple entries into the Subject Alternative Name
(not perfect due to cost and the need to reissue the cert every time you add a
domain).

Have you found any other workarounds to this problem?

~~~
izak30
I haven't. Right now, we're trying to figure it out. We work with many FQDNs.
I've been talking to a local guy who says that in bulk I could get IPs for
$3/mo at his datacenter. The price is good, but I'm then back to managing
hardware, which I don't really want to do.

------
ahlatimer
I use Linode for my sites and haven't had any problems. I've heard that
Slicehost has a better control panel (Linode has practically nothing apart
from allowing you to provision your resources), but I didn't really need
those. I just needed a VPS with root access that wouldn't break the bank, and
Linode fit the bill.

------
dstorrs
I haven't used Amazon myself, but a good friend of mine has done quite a bit
with it. When I asked him about it, he said (IIRC) that one thing to be aware
of what that you couldn't run a MySQL DB on one of their small instances--you
needed a large instance. So, something to keep in mind.

(Please do verify this--I may have misremembered or the facts may have changed
since I heard this.)

~~~
dstorrs
So that I know how to improve my comments in the future, why was this
downvoted?

It's an important thing to know, and I admitted up front that it was second-
hand knowledge with some uncertainty about it. Was the issue the second-hand
knowledge, the lack of complete certainty, or what?

------
geuis
I recently switched to Slicehost. For me, it's exactly what I want. A flat
monthly fee for a server instance and easily upgradable as needed. They
provide a choice of Linux systems, and from there you're free to build as you
see fit. They offer reverse dns, which is vital for running mail servers and
not available on Amazon( last I checked. )

