
Rackspace Reduces Cloud Files Storage Price by 33% - NARKOZ
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-updates/
======
jyap
Amazon S3 has a more competitive outgoing bandwidth pricing. That works out
best for me (lots of small files with small overall storage size but consume
lots of bandwidth).

You need to ask yourself, what is your main use case? More often than not, if
your use case is a web service serving up files over HTTP then Amazon is more
competitive. I would say bandwidth would be the greater consideration in most
cases for web services.

All of their comparison calculations
([http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/compare/))
also include "AWS Gold Support" (which costs an extra $400+/month).

~~~
nolok
Even S3 outgoing price are ridiculously expensive for any kind of significant
bandwidth use, that's what CDN are for (and in that area, cloudfront is really
not cheap either). I'm a fan of AWS and use a lot of their services, but their
bandwith price from them to the outside world are far from the best deal (of
course if your bandwith is still calculated in the hundreds of dollars this
doesn't apply/matter much).

I know you weren't saying the contrary, but still I wanted to point it out.

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po
I often get intermittent SSL errors when speaking to the Rackspace API via
python:

ssl.SSLError: The read operation timed out

I'm not the only one:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=SSLError+The+read+operation+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=SSLError+The+read+operation+timed+out+rackspace+cloudfiles)

It's not that bad since I just retry it but it's one of the things that makes
me wonder what is going on at Rackspace.

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WiseWeasel
I hate to seem ungrateful, but I just wish their bandwidth costs would come
down a bit. That said, this is much-appreciated.

The object versioning system seems interesting if you haven't rolled your own
yet, though I wonder how relying on it might affect your ability to migrate to
Amazon.

~~~
shuzchen
S3 has had object versioning since forever (okay, since 2010, but that's eons
in the web world) The original announcement is here:
[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/02/amazon-s3-enhancement-
ver...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/02/amazon-s3-enhancement-
versioning.html)

I haven't looked at the RS versioning offering, but I can't imagine it being
any different in terms of features of the amazon one.

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sakai
How long do people think it will take Amazon to match or beat this pricing
drop?

~~~
jarito
They dropped their prices in February:
[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/amazon-s3-price-
reduction...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/amazon-s3-price-
reduction.html)

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sandis
This is good news. It seems to me that Rackspace Cloud services don't get much
publicity compared to AWS, which is a shame. RS is a good alternative and
their tech support is great.

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ven_shanmugam
There are several backup solutions available in the Rackspace Cloud Tools
program:
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/tools/category/applications/c...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/tools/category/applications/cloud-
files-partners/rackspace-files-online-backup/)

You can leverage these with Rackspace Cloud Files.

~~~
RKearney
Amazon Web Services S3 is still cheaper than Rackspace Cloud so I would still
stick with Amazon.

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rb2k_
Is there any backup software similar to Arq[0] that uses Rackspace?

[0] Arq: <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>

~~~
sreitshamer
Should Arq use Rackspace (I'm the author of Arq)? So far it's only been using
S3 because that has always seemed to me to be the best option.

~~~
rb2k_
Seeing as you build your own 'filesystem' on top of a simple key/value
interface, I think advancing the backend support might be good 'low hanging
fruit'.

It doesn't even have to be something as 'cloudy' as rackspace, support for
something like webdav as an ARQ backend would also be nice.

That being said, I have actually no idea about the codebase and user base, so
this could be a completely wrong assumption :)

Personally, my biggest 'problem' with Arq at the moment is, that the iPhone
client works, but I'm missing stupid small things like thumbnail previews for
uploaded images.

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mthreat
I just wish Amazon and Rackspace would lower the price of RAM on their cloud
servers

~~~
Lukeas14
One theory is that cloud hosting providers use memory as a metric to estimate
a customer's use of resources that aren't directly paid for (bandwidth, CPU,
support, etc). So even though you may be way overpaying for increased memory
based on current RAM prices, their data may show that you're much more likely
to also use more resources you aren't directly paying for and set the price
accordingly.

