

Ask HN: Why did github choose Rackspace over Amazon EC2? - jabo

I've read a ton of articles comparing Rackspace cloud and AWS, but I was wondering what github's reasons were to go with Rackspace.
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baru
This was already answered on quora by PJ Hyett, GitHub Co-Founder:

"IO performance is essential to our business (handling an enormous amount of
disk operations) and EBS wasn't nearly as fast as bare metal when we ran
benchmarks prior to moving to Rackspace."

(from [http://www.quora.com/GitHub/Why-did-GitHub-use-Rackspace-
ove...](http://www.quora.com/GitHub/Why-did-GitHub-use-Rackspace-over-Amazon-
EC2))

While price most probably played an important role too, as indicated by
EngineYard, its former host: [http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-
and-github-t...](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-and-github-
transition/)

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mattbee
I suspect in large part because Rackspace are much better at marketing, or
were quicker off the mark than Amazon. They realise that an "en vogue" name
like github looks very good hosted with them, and are likely offering a big
discount in exchange for the "Powered by..." banner at the bottom of every
github page.

We do the same for firms wanting to host with <http://bigv.io/> though I'd not
imagine github would want a UK-based host.

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strzalek
Well, they explained it clearly in blog post:
<https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace>

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jabo
Thanks for the link, but in that article they mention why they moved from
Engine Yard to Rackspace. My question was why they didn't move to ec2 from
Engine Yard.

~~~
dcousineau
I would imagine their bullet point about flexibility and direct hardware
access is why Rackspace won over EC2. I've used both ends of Rackspace (colo
and cloud) and would imagine it would be simple to utilize both services under
a common support account (which is Rackspace's big upsell: their support). EC2
doesn't even have a colo option or partner so you'd have to roll your own
solution. Better to take advantage of the integration considdering price is
close enough.

