Rackspace cloud incoming bandwidth 100% free & un-metered? Is it really true?

[jv2222]

Please wait for a site operator to respond.

You are now chatting with 'David M.'

David M.: Welcome to Rackspace Cloud. My name is David. May I have your name and email address in case we are disconnected?

you: With cloud sites. For 100 p/m how much incoming bandwidth do I get?

David M.: 500GB per month

you: How much outgoing bandwidth do I get?

David M.: the 500GB is the outgoing

David M.: all incoming is free

you: What happens if I use 500GB incoming bandwidth p/m?

David M.: you can use as much incoming as you want... we don't bill for incoming with Cloud Sites

David M.: only outgoing

you: Ok, just to be clear. I'm thinking of hosting a web based Twitter client http://tweetminer.net on the rackspace cloud. If I had 1000 users running the client at full capacity it would equate to 879GB per month incoming bandwidth

David M.: if you're running your website on Cloud Sites.. then that 879GB of incoming bandwidth would be free

David M.: the $100/mo includes 500GB of "outgoing" bandwidth so if you don't exceed that.. then you don't have to pay bandwidth overages

you: hold one sec... let me run a calc by you

you: Based on my calculations I could host 3578 users @ 500GB per month outgoing. But those 3578 users would consume 3145 GB's Are you saying I can consume 3145 GB's per month for free?

David M.: the only free part is the incoming bandwidth to Cloud Sites

David M.: any incoming bandwidth regardless of the amount.. is free with Cloud Sites

you: What about 1000000000000GB incoming bandwidth?

you: Free?

David M.: yes it will be free... we don't measure incoming bandwidth with Cloud Sites

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My question to HN is... Do you think this is really true?

[jacquesm]

Yes, absolutely. Rackspace has TONS of idle inbound, outbound is what they're buying bandwidth for. The reason for this is very simple, the vast majority of their customers has a roughly 20:1 outbound vs inbound pattern.

Almost every big hosting provider is in the same position.

And, predictably, on ISPs it is the opposite. That's also why as a rule you don't get much uplink capacity, because as soon as you have that you can start hosting serious stuff on your home network. For instance, I have 20 Mbit down but only 2 Mbit up (well, what's only, but still the difference is huge).

I have a small (5 node dual opteron) cluster in Amsterdam co-located with a friend on a similar deal, so I really have absolutely no problem believing this.

[xlioilx]

Hi Everyone,

My name is Daniel and I actually work with the Cloud division of Rackspace. Incoming bandwidth to Cloud Sites is indeed not charged to you. @byoung2 was spot on in that compute cycles would take effect since it would be the CPU processing time that your site used to process any incoming requests on the system.

If you have any questions about the service, please feel free to contact us at any time using live chat on our site at rackspacecloud.com or calling in to 1.877.934.0409.

[lamby]

You should remember that bandwidth is sold wholesale using bit/s in chunks of (eg.) 5Mbit; limiting users by some arbitrary number of bytes is an invention of hosting companies.

Thus for "serious" levels of traffic, you should look at the actual bandwidth (as in, bit/s) you would be connected to, not the byte cap. I'm not saying they are trying to deceive you, but just that it would explain your surprise.

[bjclark → lamby]

In other words, just because you might get 10000000000gigs of "free" inbound, doesn't mean you can actually get that much inbound out of the pipe.

[jacquesm → bjclark]

Typically your inbound rate is capped by the ability of your software to process the incoming data.

For the most part that's roughly comparable to how hard it would be to generate that much data, parsing and datamining are probably a little bit more cpu intensive than generating data. So if typically you find that you can push 300 Mbit out of a box you can expect to get around that much inbound or a bit less, depending on your application.

[byoung2]

Remember with Rackspace Cloud you are also charged for "compute cycles" (a measure of CPU, memory, and database operations), storage space and outgoing bandwidth. They know that every incoming GB of data will have to get processed on the server, so they'll get you with the compute cycles, and storage, and you're going to have to send a response back to the client, so they'll get you with the outgoing bandwidth.

I host with Rackspace Cloud, and I can tell you that compute cycles go by pretty quickly with PHP/MySQL operations if you're not careful.

[jv2222 → byoung2]

You get 10000. Here's bumpf from their site....

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What are compute cycles?

Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the Rackspace Cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

How many compute cycles will my applications use?

Since web applications vary so greatly, it's hard to make a perfect guess. However, there are some guidelines that can help. First, you can think of 10,000 compute cycles as being about the same processing power as you'd get from a decent dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance. For example 10,000 compute cycles would power:

    * about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system

    * about 11 million page views of rackspacecloud.com

    * about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image

[SwellJoe]

Why would they lie? Rackspace is not some fly-by-night operation. They are, by some measures, the largest and most successful hosting provider in the world, and they have an excellent reputation. Lying to you to make a tiny sale like this would be just stupid.

[jv2222 → SwellJoe]

I wasn't really implying that they were knowingly "lying". What I was mainly questioning was that they had some kind of internal cut off point or fair usage policy.

[zeckalpha → jv2222]

The poster has a fear of $.02 =/= .02¢.

[SwellJoe → jv2222]

That would be "lying", wouldn't it? If their marketing materials clearly say it is unlimited...it would be a lie for it not to be.

[seiji]

SoftLayer switched to free unlimited incoming traffic earlier this year: http://softlayer.com/press_2009_04_21.html

[matthall28]

Limestone Networks (rented dedicated server provider) switched to free incoming bandwidth like two months ago