I'll be around all day to answer questions, or better yet - merge things into the repo to run, execute more tests, etc. I have to hand it to plot.ly - they definitely make charting... addictive.
Alright, correction - you can see the pricing if you go into the control panel -> select region -> select OS (pricing changes based on linux vs. Windows) -> select flavor.
Existing and new customers will continue to have access to the Standard flavor class Cloud Servers - the price will continue at the current prices you pay today for the Standard class. At a point in the future we will stop offering the Standard flavor class for new accounts, but have not finalized on a date for that yet.
Today, the Performance flavors are available in IAD only (additional regions coming soon). The Standard flavors continue to be available in all regions (IAD, ORD, DFW, SYD, HKG)
Personally; I'll leave that up to others - as a Rackspace employee, I'm more focused on improving what we do, how we do it, and what we offer and being transparent about that than with direct comparisons to other competitors (real and perceived).
Ideally I want to get the code in place to empower others to run the same set of tests on the host of their choice, but I personally won't participate - just like the fact we don't comment on, or take advantage of others' downtime[1], I don't want to get in a shooting match, especially as I represent one of the vendors, and can be accused of bias.
Very nice! The improved performance in the reworked architecture is impressive.
> Pick a language framework, pick a web framework, heck, pick a web server or entire application we can throw apachebench at with one of the 120GB monsters we have and we’ll put it together
We've asked Rackspace to run our suite and the introduction [1] still contains the following sentence: "How does EC2 compare to, say, Rackspace Cloud? We don't have the data now, but if you have a Rackspace Cloud account and are willing to run the full test suite, we'd like to be able to render that here."
We'd love to see Rackspace Performance Cloud as another hardware tab alongside our current i7 and EC2 results.
Separately, we had a contributor who put together some Windows Azure scripts but we've not heard from him for a while and I think we need someone else to volunteer to pick that up.
Excellent. I don't mean to put you on the spot. :) But I did figure this was an opportunity to ping Rackspace again in case you might be interested in running our test suite on your virtual servers.
The i7 hardware we test on is just our workstations, which are possibly similar to your Performance 1 8GB, but you would probably be able to map it more accurately. Specifically, they are Sandy Bridge i7-2600Ks with 8GB of memory.
I run 2x2GB, 2x1GB, and 2x512MB servers on DigitalOcean for only slightly more than one 2GB Rackspace server :\
I understand why their costs might be higher (excellent support staff, always had stellar support from RS), but it doesn't really justify that much of a difference.
Digital Ocean is cool and everything, however they're new to the cloud hosting industry. Take for instance Rackspace or AWS, they've been around for a long time and they can command a high price due to their longevity and also can charge higher prices because their target customers are not as price sensitive as you. Rackspace in particular can charge higher fees because of their support and SLAs, if there is a problem you can't figure out, and you have some money to spend they can find some one to fix it for your organization.
Oh I agree, I just wish they offered a different tier or something around half their current prices. I'd be willing to pay more to host with Rackspace as I've had great experiences with them in the past, but I just plain can't afford to host my current project with them.
The longevity doesn't mean much in the world of hosting, it's like the disclaimer that you see when looking at financial products: "past results do not guarantee future performance".
The advantage of a "old" hosting company is that it's less likely to go out of business in a heartbeat, it's not necessarily enough to convince me in paying more for the same services that I can get elsewhere.
Spec-wise that 60G box is comparable to hi1.4xlarge, which is storage optimized, and you're looking at $2263 at AWS base pricing (this is ignoring reserved and spot-pricing). While their pricing is indeed rather high, it appears to be similar to at least AWS pricing.
Don't buy into the cloud hype. Buy your own servers and colocate. In less than a year, I've been able to build up a server rack at my colo by purchasing for pennies on the dollar lease-expired top of the line servers: 16 cores minimum & 32 gigs ram minimum, for usually around $100. They are all reliable servers, which I clean up and rack. Today, I offer hosting as a side business with $200 per month providing the equal to what RackSpace's Performance servers offer in triplicate: dev, hosting & staging, with git migration and programmatic file synchronization between them. For the "critical" pieces and parts I've custom designed and built heavy iron servers that are simply not available anywhere. Why be a drop in someone else's cloud when you can easily create your own entire sky?
I know people who manage server farms for medium to large companies. They lease their servers, and when the lease is over you can often directly contact the lessor and learn they have a room of such servers just collecting dust. Likewise, my colo has customers who abandon accounts - leaving perfectly fine hardware behind. Just keeping one's eyes and ears open for the opportunities pays off.
You likely aren't their target audience. My guess is they are catering to enterprises keen to move into the cloud and for whom TCO is more than just the price of the server.
Also Linode is a security nightmare and Hetzner doesn't always have instances available.
Given Linode's recent security vulnerabilities, I would stay away from them if I needed security. I'm not sure who to turn to, though, maybe a dedicated box would be innately more secure.
To be fair, Rackspace could also be a security nightmare just waiting to be discovered. For example, as of about a year ago, the way Rackspace generated the initial root passwords for cloud instances was by taking the hostname and appending a bunch of random characters to it. Unfortunately, they put a DES hash in /etc/shadow, so only the first 8 characters mattered, most or all of which were taken up by the predictable hostname. And yes, root logins over ssh were on by default. When this was reported to them, they initially denied it, and only acknowledged and fixed it after much wrangling and, in my opinion, an excessive amount of time.
Agreed. Just taking a look at their hardware:
"Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2670 2.60GHz based systems (up to 32 vCPUs!)"
That's clearly the v1 (Sandy Bridge) E5 2670 that came out in March 2012, with 8 cores per CPU, 16 cores per machine, and 32 logical threads.
The v2 (Ivy Bridge) E5 2670v2 came out back in September with 10x 2.5GHz cores per CPU, or 20 cores per machine, and 40 logical threads. As well as having slightly improved performance/clock due to the new architecture.
Not that it should really matter; once you get up to the prices of the Performance 1 4GB or 8GB, bare metal makes more sense. An E3 1240v3 has 74% the performance of an E5 2670v1, and would obviously run circles around a 12.5% or 25% share of the E5, without even taking the I/O hit of running virtualization into account.
As much as I love to see Rackspace roll out more highly-performing cloud servers, as a customer I'd rather see stability improvements to their core systems.
Their current ("next-gen") cloud offering has had serious noisy-neighbor issues with networking performance, and the maintenance to attempt and resolve these issues architecturally caused some serious pain during two consecutive maintenance windows. ( Hour+ downtime for dozens of nodes. )
Management API availability and reliability also leaves a lot to be desired.
This deserves a post of its own - but what you're saying has been a major focus for our product teams. I can say that reliability, performance, build times, etc have been greatly improved. Let me check with the team to see what I can discuss externally. Drop me a line: jesse.noller@rackspace.com if you have additional feedback
"... completely re-engineered from the ground up to deliver..." has to be one of the most overused marketing phrases in technology. As if redoing everything is always a good thing.
That aside, I'll have to give them a test run. I was happy with rackspace cloud servers before I switched to linode and now digital ocean. The only thing that has had me switching is pricing, but if these perform well, I may use them for certain applications. I'd love for a 3rd party to benchmark these vs digital ocean so we can compare price and performance.
You should (using the methodology and scripts/notes) be able to run the same comparisons yourself: let me know if I omitted anything that would prevent you from running the same tests.
This is definitely a nice improvement, but it's hard for me to get excited about it since it isn't available on the lower end. I'd be all over this if I could get a 1-2GB VM with the extra speed, though I understand that Rackspace is probably more interested in the larger customers first.
Something I think that Linode has done really well with is making these next-gen type upgrades available across their entire range of instance sizes. EC2 and Rackspace both created a separate (expensive) tier that you have to buy into, whereas with Linode I just woke up one morning and had 2x the RAM, 2xThe cores, better disk speed, etc.
Different companies, different strategies, but I do wish some of these new instance types would trickle down.
We still have the 1&2 GB flavor types - (1,2,4,8GB), quoting my post:
"We eliminated the lowest end flavor (512) and will start with the competitively priced the 1GB flavor, while drastically increasing its performance from the previous 1 GB offering (we have charts!). This means that the price per month for a 1GB instance is now $29.20/Month ($0.04/Hr). All together? The performance you get for the new prices across all of the Performance Cloud Server flavors is amazingly competitive and a great improvement to the Rackspace portfolio."
I do hope the 1&2 GB types have seen performance boosts, because at $30 and $60/month respectively, you're a bit above Linode, which is pretty performance-focused. Without very good performance from this "Performance 1" tier, I suspect you'll further lose the lower end market. Though I get the perception that Rackspace isn't interested in the lower end market, given the prices for some of the higher end VMs and the dedicated boxes.
Are these charts on the previous and current performance for the 1&2GB instances visible somewhere?
I have a next gen server and am in the control panel - I can't see anywhere to create a new performance server or convert my existing next gen to performance. Am I missing something?
My tests with rackspace old servers showed that they are slow as hell, if compared with my Euro4/month Xen server at Ingate. I dont know how they managed to cripple Xen, to be worse the VZ, but they did.
The new so called performance cloud servers are in a price range, that calls for a dedicated server at Hetzner or OVH.
Sorry, no bounty: Xen should be cheaper then dedicated, and not crippled. I wont recommend Rackspace. Not even to my competition.
I don't think a claim like this holds much weight until you run the tests and compare the new servers to other offerings. I understand you did tests on their older virtualized servers and are applying some type of logic to those results to claim the new servers are 'crippled'. Unfortunately, until you run the tests on the new servers, and are transparent about how you conducted those tests, it's unlikely your recommendations will be fair and balanced.
I'd be interested in how you test your servers and what methodology you use to make comparisons in performance and pricing. It's an issue everyone in the industry will need to address as compute moves toward becoming commodity.
I had been testing Rackspace servers with real life applications, e.g Modx, Magento or Wordpress. And rackspace had been several times slower than my Ingate Euro4/month Xen system. Both in terms of CPU performance (wondering how to cripple this) and even worse in terms of bandwidth.
About pricing: $5-$20 is a good price range for Xen. $25-$100 is a good range for dedicated servers. $100++ calls for colocation. The 'cheapest' of your performance servers compares to a cheap Hetzner or S4U dedicated server, that allows to run Linux Containers.
And most important: !NEVER! bundle hosting contract with domain name contract, so you can switch easily, if your site hits traffic.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadhttp://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/
Are they grandfathered at that pricing? And for how long?
Can new customers even get that low end server today?
The blog post says "eventually" but some others have pointed out that the pricing is missing today.
Today, the Performance flavors are available in IAD only (additional regions coming soon). The Standard flavors continue to be available in all regions (IAD, ORD, DFW, SYD, HKG)
See also: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/05/racks... for a good review.
Ideally I want to get the code in place to empower others to run the same set of tests on the host of their choice, but I personally won't participate - just like the fact we don't comment on, or take advantage of others' downtime[1], I don't want to get in a shooting match, especially as I represent one of the vendors, and can be accused of bias.
[1]: https://github.com/rackspace/social_media_guidelines/blob/ma...
AWS instances generally are a bit lower in performance than rackspace offers.
Disclaimer: I work at exoscale. https://exoscale.ch
> Pick a language framework, pick a web framework, heck, pick a web server or entire application we can throw apachebench at with one of the 120GB monsters we have and we’ll put it together
We've asked Rackspace to run our suite and the introduction [1] still contains the following sentence: "How does EC2 compare to, say, Rackspace Cloud? We don't have the data now, but if you have a Rackspace Cloud account and are willing to run the full test suite, we'd like to be able to render that here."
We'd love to see Rackspace Performance Cloud as another hardware tab alongside our current i7 and EC2 results.
Separately, we had a contributor who put together some Windows Azure scripts but we've not heard from him for a while and I think we need someone else to volunteer to pick that up.
[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=intro
The i7 hardware we test on is just our workstations, which are possibly similar to your Performance 1 8GB, but you would probably be able to map it more accurately. Specifically, they are Sandy Bridge i7-2600Ks with 8GB of memory.
$2000/mo for a 60G box...
For that money you can buy an equivalent server every month.
And don't get me started on $4000/mo for 120G, that's almost two equivalent servers. Every month.
I understand why their costs might be higher (excellent support staff, always had stellar support from RS), but it doesn't really justify that much of a difference.
The advantage of a "old" hosting company is that it's less likely to go out of business in a heartbeat, it's not necessarily enough to convince me in paying more for the same services that I can get elsewhere.
Also Linode is a security nightmare and Hetzner doesn't always have instances available.
To be fair, Rackspace could also be a security nightmare just waiting to be discovered. For example, as of about a year ago, the way Rackspace generated the initial root passwords for cloud instances was by taking the hostname and appending a bunch of random characters to it. Unfortunately, they put a DES hash in /etc/shadow, so only the first 8 characters mattered, most or all of which were taken up by the predictable hostname. And yes, root logins over ssh were on by default. When this was reported to them, they initially denied it, and only acknowledged and fixed it after much wrangling and, in my opinion, an excessive amount of time.
That's clearly the v1 (Sandy Bridge) E5 2670 that came out in March 2012, with 8 cores per CPU, 16 cores per machine, and 32 logical threads.
The v2 (Ivy Bridge) E5 2670v2 came out back in September with 10x 2.5GHz cores per CPU, or 20 cores per machine, and 40 logical threads. As well as having slightly improved performance/clock due to the new architecture.
Not that it should really matter; once you get up to the prices of the Performance 1 4GB or 8GB, bare metal makes more sense. An E3 1240v3 has 74% the performance of an E5 2670v1, and would obviously run circles around a 12.5% or 25% share of the E5, without even taking the I/O hit of running virtualization into account.
Their current ("next-gen") cloud offering has had serious noisy-neighbor issues with networking performance, and the maintenance to attempt and resolve these issues architecturally caused some serious pain during two consecutive maintenance windows. ( Hour+ downtime for dozens of nodes. )
Management API availability and reliability also leaves a lot to be desired.
That aside, I'll have to give them a test run. I was happy with rackspace cloud servers before I switched to linode and now digital ocean. The only thing that has had me switching is pricing, but if these perform well, I may use them for certain applications. I'd love for a 3rd party to benchmark these vs digital ocean so we can compare price and performance.
Something I think that Linode has done really well with is making these next-gen type upgrades available across their entire range of instance sizes. EC2 and Rackspace both created a separate (expensive) tier that you have to buy into, whereas with Linode I just woke up one morning and had 2x the RAM, 2xThe cores, better disk speed, etc.
Different companies, different strategies, but I do wish some of these new instance types would trickle down.
"We eliminated the lowest end flavor (512) and will start with the competitively priced the 1GB flavor, while drastically increasing its performance from the previous 1 GB offering (we have charts!). This means that the price per month for a 1GB instance is now $29.20/Month ($0.04/Hr). All together? The performance you get for the new prices across all of the Performance Cloud Server flavors is amazingly competitive and a great improvement to the Rackspace portfolio."
Are these charts on the previous and current performance for the 1&2GB instances visible somewhere?
My current server is Win 2008 1GB.
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-...
The new so called performance cloud servers are in a price range, that calls for a dedicated server at Hetzner or OVH.
Sorry, no bounty: Xen should be cheaper then dedicated, and not crippled. I wont recommend Rackspace. Not even to my competition.
I'd be interested in how you test your servers and what methodology you use to make comparisons in performance and pricing. It's an issue everyone in the industry will need to address as compute moves toward becoming commodity.
About pricing: $5-$20 is a good price range for Xen. $25-$100 is a good range for dedicated servers. $100++ calls for colocation. The 'cheapest' of your performance servers compares to a cheap Hetzner or S4U dedicated server, that allows to run Linux Containers.
And most important: !NEVER! bundle hosting contract with domain name contract, so you can switch easily, if your site hits traffic.