10 ms·

Rackspace Launches Developer Discount

159 points by jnoller 13y ago

jnoller 13y ago
And like always: I'm around to answer questions.
- workhere-io 13y ago
  Cloud Files invalidations: Is it technically possible to make invalidations that are performed in just a couple of minutes or even seconds? That's a feature I really miss both on Cloud Files and on CloudFront.
  - jnoller 13y ago
    Checking with the product team right now.
  - creiht 13y ago
    Hi, I work on the cloudfiles team. I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN. Currently, the minimum that it can be is 15 minutes. We partner with Akamai for the CDN functionality, so while we get all the benefits of the Akamai network, we also have to work within the parameters of their systems. Would you mind sharing more about your use case for needing shorter TTLs?
    - workhere-io 13y ago
      I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN Actually I'm talking about what you refer to as edge purge (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-cdn-gets-edge-purge/ http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-cdn-gets-edge-purg...) and AWS refers to as invalidations.
      - creiht 13y ago
        Ahh, sorry. Yes, there are limitations around edge purging (how many you can do at a time, and how long it takes for the purges to occur). All of these are also dependent on parameters defined by Akamai. I'll pass the feedback on to our product team as we try to make that experience better. Thanks!
- fizz_and_buzz 13y ago
  Why not Germany :( Or rather why is it restricted to the US and the UK?
  - jnoller 13y ago
    It's not: I just pushed a change to master and I am waiting on the cache to invalidation. Anyone anywhere can use either the UK or US clouds. I made a mistake saying "I am in..."
- beech 13y ago
  I've signed up to about 4 different hosts recently (including Rackspace) to test them out. If I wanted to take you up on the offer would I have to sign up for a new account or can it be back dated? Thanks!
  - jnoller 13y ago
    I apologize; new accounts only - we can not back date or apply to existing. Limitations! :(
    - beech 13y ago
      Understandable, cheers!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - jnoller 13y ago
    Got it - escalating to the product teams. As for the final one: > Why does Rackspace's API use "Keystone" auth instead of just API tokens or Oauth like everyone else? We would have to create a special Rackspace auth system just to support Rackspace with our service. Everyone else in the world uses Oauth or API tokens, or passwords which works a lot like API tokens, but Rackspace uses this crazy system nobody else in the world uses that requires refreshing tokens. Actually, Token-based auth is quite common, as well as token refreshes. This is pretty standard for cloud provider APIs for compute, storage, etc. Amazon, Rackspace, Google and others all use the account -> API Key model. This actually uses API tokens which is the industry and OpenStack standard. For OAuth - we've discussed this, there is a cloud partner in the cloud tools market place which does this. This isn't the first time I've gotten this request, so I'm going to pass it to the product teams as well.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - frankydp 13y ago
      The parent was an extremely direct explanation of limitations that should be shown. It's deletion greatly reduced this discussion.
- asb 13y ago
  Is there any possibility Rackspace may add a spot market to their product offering? Indeed if you or anyone else has any insight as to why Amazon remains (to my knowledge) the only "cloud" hosting vendor to offer spot pricing I'd be very interested.
  - jnoller 13y ago
    I'm going to apologize - but I can not comment future-looking/roadmap items like this. I can say I would like it - but beyond that not much else.
    - asb 13y ago
      I expected that, thanks anyway. Really I was just checking there wasn't some sort of "Rackspace is fundamentally opposed to the concept of spot pricing" belief I had missed somewhere. Cheers.
- larrys 13y ago
  From what I see there is no restriction if you are an existing rackspace customer to get this discount for anything new. So you may want to consider a way that the discount can be applied on any new services signed up for in the existing cloud panel. While it's trivial for someone to sign up for a new account, it would make more sense (for your tracking purposes) to have people just enable the discount (once again on additional services) in an existing RS cloud account. Besides would like to just manage everything from the same account generally.
  - jnoller 13y ago
    I agree; in a perfect world (and the one I'd like to see) we would be able to apply this to existing accounts. Given internal limitations though, it's not as simple as it should be. Let me talk to customer service and see if we can do this if a user contacts us.
- ujsfdo 13y ago
  Can you fix apps.rackspace email? I've been using it for 2 years now and I am unable to compose emails on iOS devices. The compose pain won't respond to the device keyboard. Otherwise great.
  - jnoller 13y ago
    Sent to the product team
  - rackerhazzard 13y ago
    ujsfdo, try https://app.rackspace.com/mobile https://app.rackspace.com/mobile and let me know what you think.
- zzzcpan 13y ago
  Will I be able to sign up for developer discount next year?
  - jnoller 13y ago
    We do not have an end date for this discount right now. Hopefully we can just continually improve it.
- viraptor 13y ago
  Any chance that you're going to improve the instance startup time soon? It's really bad now - even compared to a naïve setup of devstack on small spinning medium. I'm sure that lots of your customers use the latest release of ubuntu as a base image so I'd expect it is cached locally on most hosts... I don't get why it would take minutes to spawn a new instance in that case :( (Openstack dev's perspective)
  - jnoller 13y ago
    Yes. This is an extremely high priority
gregw134 13y ago
The discount says it doesn't apply to cloud sites or managed cloud, but on the signup page I only see options for cloud account or managed cloud. If I select Cloud Account, will the discount still apply?
- jnoller 13y ago
  Cloud Sites is a specific product: you want to use "Cloud Account" - sorry I couldn't strip out the other options when signing up. There's some history / time there that applies.
300bps 13y ago
I use Azure VMs but this post got me to check out your pricing again. You're not as expensive as I remember. In fact you look right in line with Azure and EC2. Looks like with this program you can get a free 1 GB Linux or almost free 1 GB Windows server for 6 months anyway. Thanks for the program - it put you back on my radar.
- jnoller 13y ago
  Yes, we're actually very cost competitive for VMs - and cloud files includes a global CDN. I'm really, really, really happy this put us back on your radar. If you run into issues or have questions - jesse.noller@rackspace.com - my door is always open.
  - NonEUCitizen 13y ago
    What's the URL to your pricing page?
    - jnoller 13y ago
      http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/pricing/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/pricing/
      - NonEUCitizen 13y ago
        Do you support setting a cap on cloud files? e.g. customer sets some limit, say, $500/month, and if it ever hits that number it stops serving files instead of running up charges. And/or do you support triggers, so customer gets an email when charges run up to $200, then another email at $300, etc. ?
        russell_h 13y ago
        We don't currently support hard limits, but we've partnered with Cloudability, which lets you set budget alerts: https://cloudability.com/rackspace/ https://cloudability.com/rackspace/
desigooner 13y ago
Is this Discount available for a limited time only or on all future signups? I'm about to finish a project and travel for a couple of weeks so I don't anticipate myself using it anytime within the next month. As a result, if this discount is not expiring, I'd prefer delaying the signup by a month =)
- jnoller 13y ago
  We do not have a plan to terminate this discount that anyone has told me. In fact I would like to keep it for the foreseeable future.
- kordless 13y ago
  It's going to stick around for a while, and definitely longer than a month! :)
clicks 13y ago
Pretty nifty. One thing, while I have the ears of you Rackspace people: offer more documentation maybe? Kind of like how Linode does: https://library.linode.com/ https://library.linode.com/ Common things like how to run a mail server, how to get a LAMP/LEMP/LNPP/$XYZ setup going on, etc. Not full books or anything, just stuff to get things off the ground more easily when playing around. This is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to Linode, the docs, and the support whenever I'd join their IRC channel. It was good stuff, to get things running even though this is not my field by trade.
- kordless 13y ago
  That's an excellent suggestion and I appreciate you making it! I was thinking about cookbook examples via Vagrant and Docker, which allows a user to get an environment up quickly that can be used for the learning process.
- russell_h 13y ago
  Agreed, Linode's library is awesome. One thing we're working on already is a knowledge base. A lot of it is product-specific, but we're accumulating an increasing number of general articles like you're referring to. You can see a lot of them here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/cloud-servers http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/c...
- jnoller 13y ago
  Like kordless said: Completely and totally agreed. Tutorials and best practices are critical and it is probably one of my top to-do items.
DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
WHAT THE HELL, RACKSPACE?! You emailed me just because I semi-filled in your form? I didn't even click SUBMIT! o_O Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment? Did you even consider that my NOT submitting the form was a conscious decision? Maybe I realized halfway through filling the form that my skill-set wasn't good enough to make me want to sign up now? Or my finances wouldn't allow me to maintain an account on your platform after six months? Or maybe, just maybe, I just didn't want to sign up right now? Why would you take my email ID from a non-submit-clicked form and NOT tell me that you had taken it? Why? o_O Even worse, why would you email me asking 'did I forget to take my cloud'? How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?
- kordless 13y ago
  Using Chrome's developer tools shows the form submits your email address when it checks your username. It's possible it's going into Marketo and then you are getting emailed automatically when the record doesn't end up updating. It could be intentional, or it could be accidentally mixed with other site behaviors. I'll check on it for you and figure out what's going on. Regardless, I agree with you assertion you shouldn't be emailed if you didn't click submit. Thanks for mentioning it!
  - johns 13y ago
    Are you a Racker now? Bio still mentions Loggly.
    - kordless 13y ago
      I'm a contractor. Thanks for mentioning my profile - I updated my email address to the correct one!
  - DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
    Okay, I understand if the form is sending my email address to check if I am an existing customer. I can understand if it wants to check if the username I want is available. Both of these are valid actions and usually helpful for new customers. However, I can assure you that the email is intentional. Here's the text of the email: > We noticed that you started signing up for Rackspace Cloud, but you didn’t finish. Your cloud is ready for you, and it says it’s getting lonely. Apart from the cheesiness of the text and the language, one thing stands out clearly: The process that handles your form submissions knew that I didn't finish signing up. > Don’t let your cloud be lonely and sad – finish signing up for Rackspace Cloud and start using it to spin up a website, an app, or any awesome new project. > You can finish your sign-up HERE. [ed. I have removed the link associated with `HERE`] Again, ignoring the cheesiness of the text, this sentence clearly indicates that the email is triggered when someone (like me) DOESN'T finish signing up. While I appreciate your proactive attempts to acquire potential customers, this definitely veers into creepy... > If you have any questions about signing up or our products, give us a call or shoot us an email. We're here to help! One question: How do I ensure that my email is NOT added to any of your newsletters that I MOST DEFINITELY - NOW OR EVER - DID NOT SIGN UP FOR? (Apologies for the all caps. I am a little unnerved by this. I never expected RackSpace to do this sort of a thing.)
rsync 13y ago
We're not a competitor and are not in this space, so I hope it's not untoward to note that we (rsync.net) also have a FOSS/.edu/dev/HN discount: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700 ... so after you've got your environment up and running at rackspace (or wherever) you can get a similar discount for offsite backups.
- jnoller 13y ago
  Nice! This is excellent. We're freely hosting many OSS projects - the more FOSS/.edu/dev discounts, free tiers and benefits we can get out to the world, the better
- thejosh 13y ago
  rsync.net is fantastic, I use them for their HK datacenter which allows excellent speed to AU. Their email about git-annex users not submitting a single ticket was funny as well. :-)
- e911 13y ago
  Is there any way to protect backups from being deleted? ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups. And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups (bad backup script or evil attacker trying to delete eevrything).
  - corobo 13y ago
    (not rsync, just a happy customer!) It may be a tiny bit of a chore but you can get sub-accounts set up if it's a potential problem: http://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html#7a http://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html#7a
  - dspillett 13y ago
    > ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups. This seems's to be covered in the FAQ: Do you have multi-user access? Yes. You may configure additional users, at no cost, that can log in and share your account. You may control access and file permissions with standard Unix tools like 'chmod' and 'chgrp'. So you could give each content unit its own account and protect it from the others. > And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups That one is fun to arrange. Many services like rsync.net offer daily snapshots for a number of days so you can't easily kill everything in one huge cock-up, but if you don't notice a problem for weeks then all your daily snapshots prior to the problem may have expired and data therefore lost. The only real answer here is to have some form of regular checking (both automated and human powered in case the automated checking fails and fails to inform you) of your backups.
deleted 13y ago
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braum 13y ago
Do you have instructions or a guide on how to migrate an existing Windows VM from Amazon to your cloud?
- mariojv 13y ago
  This might help: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-a-net-application-from-amazon-web-services http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-... EDIT: Also, this is a mapping of AWS resources to Rackspace resources: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of-amazon-web-services-resources-to-rackspace-resources http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of...
rsmith05 13y ago
No support for the North? Sad to see Canada not included.
- jnoller 13y ago
  We don't have data centers in Canada, but Chicago may have recently been annexed to Canada. So, if you are fine with using a US based cloud account, just sign up and use the Chicago region/datacenter. You, and all of Canada are welcome!
  - patrickdeuley 13y ago
    I may be wrong on this, but I'm at least 60% certain that Chicago is in Canada. Correct?
    - sbarre 13y ago
      Canada wishes, if only for the restaurants..
indubitably 13y ago
rackspace ripped me off
- iancarroll 13y ago
  Before making bold claims, you should really state what happened and what they tried (or didn't try) to do.
chris_mahan 13y ago
What are the odds on making a very low power machine, in the 96-128 MB of RAM, for say, $1-$3/month? I like RS (have been a customer since 2008) but the minimum service is still overkill for what I like to do. I use other services like buyvm.net for low-cost machines.
philip1209 13y ago
Our student group has been in the Rackspace Startup Program, where it receives a similar discount every month. Looking at the billing records, I want to point out that the way Rackspace runs the accounting is a bit oddly - they charge my credit card the full amount, then issue a refund a few days later. On my statement, it surprised me to see a charge- keep this in mind, especially if you intend to stay under $50/month and do not anticipate charges.
- jnoller 13y ago
  This is handled completely differently than the startup program discounts. This is an automated discount code via the shopping cart which is applied (which is a first for us as a company).
  - SwaroopH 13y ago
    Good to hear you guys have finally updated your billing system. We and many others had refused to accept the $24k sponsorship because of the insane requirement.
jread 13y ago
6 months/$300 credit - similar to the AWS 1 year free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/. Rackspace needs to upgrade their underlying years old AMD 4170/2374 hardware for cloud servers. This is a limitation for vertical scaling, and doesn't compare well to EC2/GCE/HP.
- jnoller 13y ago
  Are you talking about the cloud server (nova) hosts, or the dedicated gear?
  - jread 13y ago
    cloud servers
    - jnoller 13y ago
      thanks - let me talk to the teams. I can't talk about migrations / upgrades publicly, but I know the teams have been working on this and thinking hard on it.
      - jread 13y ago
        That would be good - I wrote a blog post on the topic. Rackspace cloud servers CPU performance caps out low and $/CPU value isn't good on large instance types: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-performance.html#graph1_2013_05_29 http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-...
mattjaynes 13y ago
The article mentions Salt and Ansible - if you're interested in these new generation config management tools, check out my book which launches tomorrow: "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible" http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-ansible.html http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a... In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with. I definitely had some big surprises when writing the book. Spoiler: Ansible was by far the simplest, easiest to understand, and quickest to get up and going. To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-ansible.html http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...
- ylem 13y ago
  I signed up, but no code yet...
jensenbox 13y ago
:( credit card required
jimmcslim 13y ago
Only US and UK at the moment, any chance to showing us devs down under in Australia some love? Edit: Especially since there are now .au Rackspace data centres!
- jnoller 13y ago
  We are working as fast as possible to expand it to the other locales as soon as we can.
  - djt 13y ago
    let us know when you do!
  - lemiffe 13y ago
    I am a UK national, just signed up using my UK bank account, however, I am currently living in Mexico, where I also have a bank account. Is there any chance I can change my credit card and address? I don't mind having a London (LON) server for now.
    - jnoller 13y ago
      Contact customer service: they will take care of you!
ashray 13y ago
I have to say here that I've been impressed with both the price and performance of Cloudfiles. I was using S3+Cloudfront for a long time and with cloudfiles my bills pretty much HALVED. What made the difference ? GET request pricing. Amazon S3 charges for each get request on an object, so with millions of requests on small objects, you get hit pretty hard. Also, Akamai seems to be really fast :)

159 points by jnoller 13y ago

jnoller 13y ago

And like always: I'm around to answer questions.

workhere-io 13y ago
Cloud Files invalidations: Is it technically possible to make invalidations that are performed in just a couple of minutes or even seconds? That's a feature I really miss both on Cloud Files and on CloudFront.
- jnoller 13y ago
  Checking with the product team right now.
- creiht 13y ago
  Hi, I work on the cloudfiles team. I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN. Currently, the minimum that it can be is 15 minutes. We partner with Akamai for the CDN functionality, so while we get all the benefits of the Akamai network, we also have to work within the parameters of their systems. Would you mind sharing more about your use case for needing shorter TTLs?
  - workhere-io 13y ago
    I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN Actually I'm talking about what you refer to as edge purge (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-cdn-gets-edge-purge/ http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-cdn-gets-edge-purg...) and AWS refers to as invalidations.
    - creiht 13y ago
      Ahh, sorry. Yes, there are limitations around edge purging (how many you can do at a time, and how long it takes for the purges to occur). All of these are also dependent on parameters defined by Akamai. I'll pass the feedback on to our product team as we try to make that experience better. Thanks!
fizz_and_buzz 13y ago
Why not Germany :( Or rather why is it restricted to the US and the UK?
- jnoller 13y ago
  It's not: I just pushed a change to master and I am waiting on the cache to invalidation. Anyone anywhere can use either the UK or US clouds. I made a mistake saying "I am in..."
beech 13y ago
I've signed up to about 4 different hosts recently (including Rackspace) to test them out. If I wanted to take you up on the offer would I have to sign up for a new account or can it be back dated? Thanks!
- jnoller 13y ago
  I apologize; new accounts only - we can not back date or apply to existing. Limitations! :(
  - beech 13y ago
    Understandable, cheers!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- jnoller 13y ago
  Got it - escalating to the product teams. As for the final one: > Why does Rackspace's API use "Keystone" auth instead of just API tokens or Oauth like everyone else? We would have to create a special Rackspace auth system just to support Rackspace with our service. Everyone else in the world uses Oauth or API tokens, or passwords which works a lot like API tokens, but Rackspace uses this crazy system nobody else in the world uses that requires refreshing tokens. Actually, Token-based auth is quite common, as well as token refreshes. This is pretty standard for cloud provider APIs for compute, storage, etc. Amazon, Rackspace, Google and others all use the account -> API Key model. This actually uses API tokens which is the industry and OpenStack standard. For OAuth - we've discussed this, there is a cloud partner in the cloud tools market place which does this. This isn't the first time I've gotten this request, so I'm going to pass it to the product teams as well.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - frankydp 13y ago
    The parent was an extremely direct explanation of limitations that should be shown. It's deletion greatly reduced this discussion.
asb 13y ago
Is there any possibility Rackspace may add a spot market to their product offering? Indeed if you or anyone else has any insight as to why Amazon remains (to my knowledge) the only "cloud" hosting vendor to offer spot pricing I'd be very interested.
- jnoller 13y ago
  I'm going to apologize - but I can not comment future-looking/roadmap items like this. I can say I would like it - but beyond that not much else.
  - asb 13y ago
    I expected that, thanks anyway. Really I was just checking there wasn't some sort of "Rackspace is fundamentally opposed to the concept of spot pricing" belief I had missed somewhere. Cheers.
larrys 13y ago
From what I see there is no restriction if you are an existing rackspace customer to get this discount for anything new. So you may want to consider a way that the discount can be applied on any new services signed up for in the existing cloud panel. While it's trivial for someone to sign up for a new account, it would make more sense (for your tracking purposes) to have people just enable the discount (once again on additional services) in an existing RS cloud account. Besides would like to just manage everything from the same account generally.
- jnoller 13y ago
  I agree; in a perfect world (and the one I'd like to see) we would be able to apply this to existing accounts. Given internal limitations though, it's not as simple as it should be. Let me talk to customer service and see if we can do this if a user contacts us.
ujsfdo 13y ago
Can you fix apps.rackspace email? I've been using it for 2 years now and I am unable to compose emails on iOS devices. The compose pain won't respond to the device keyboard. Otherwise great.
- jnoller 13y ago
  Sent to the product team
- rackerhazzard 13y ago
  ujsfdo, try https://app.rackspace.com/mobile https://app.rackspace.com/mobile and let me know what you think.
zzzcpan 13y ago
Will I be able to sign up for developer discount next year?
- jnoller 13y ago
  We do not have an end date for this discount right now. Hopefully we can just continually improve it.
viraptor 13y ago
Any chance that you're going to improve the instance startup time soon? It's really bad now - even compared to a naïve setup of devstack on small spinning medium. I'm sure that lots of your customers use the latest release of ubuntu as a base image so I'd expect it is cached locally on most hosts... I don't get why it would take minutes to spawn a new instance in that case :( (Openstack dev's perspective)
- jnoller 13y ago
  Yes. This is an extremely high priority

gregw134 13y ago

The discount says it doesn't apply to cloud sites or managed cloud, but on the signup page I only see options for cloud account or managed cloud. If I select Cloud Account, will the discount still apply?

jnoller 13y ago
Cloud Sites is a specific product: you want to use "Cloud Account" - sorry I couldn't strip out the other options when signing up. There's some history / time there that applies.

300bps 13y ago

I use Azure VMs but this post got me to check out your pricing again. You're not as expensive as I remember. In fact you look right in line with Azure and EC2. Looks like with this program you can get a free 1 GB Linux or almost free 1 GB Windows server for 6 months anyway. Thanks for the program - it put you back on my radar.

jnoller 13y ago
Yes, we're actually very cost competitive for VMs - and cloud files includes a global CDN. I'm really, really, really happy this put us back on your radar. If you run into issues or have questions - jesse.noller@rackspace.com - my door is always open.
- NonEUCitizen 13y ago
  What's the URL to your pricing page?
  - jnoller 13y ago
    http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/pricing/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/pricing/
    - NonEUCitizen 13y ago
      Do you support setting a cap on cloud files? e.g. customer sets some limit, say, $500/month, and if it ever hits that number it stops serving files instead of running up charges. And/or do you support triggers, so customer gets an email when charges run up to $200, then another email at $300, etc. ?
      - russell_h 13y ago
        We don't currently support hard limits, but we've partnered with Cloudability, which lets you set budget alerts: https://cloudability.com/rackspace/ https://cloudability.com/rackspace/

desigooner 13y ago

Is this Discount available for a limited time only or on all future signups? I'm about to finish a project and travel for a couple of weeks so I don't anticipate myself using it anytime within the next month. As a result, if this discount is not expiring, I'd prefer delaying the signup by a month =)

jnoller 13y ago
We do not have a plan to terminate this discount that anyone has told me. In fact I would like to keep it for the foreseeable future.
kordless 13y ago
It's going to stick around for a while, and definitely longer than a month! :)

clicks 13y ago

Pretty nifty. One thing, while I have the ears of you Rackspace people: offer more documentation maybe? Kind of like how Linode does: https://library.linode.com/ https://library.linode.com/ Common things like how to run a mail server, how to get a LAMP/LEMP/LNPP/$XYZ setup going on, etc. Not full books or anything, just stuff to get things off the ground more easily when playing around. This is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to Linode, the docs, and the support whenever I'd join their IRC channel. It was good stuff, to get things running even though this is not my field by trade.

kordless 13y ago
That's an excellent suggestion and I appreciate you making it! I was thinking about cookbook examples via Vagrant and Docker, which allows a user to get an environment up quickly that can be used for the learning process.
russell_h 13y ago
Agreed, Linode's library is awesome. One thing we're working on already is a knowledge base. A lot of it is product-specific, but we're accumulating an increasing number of general articles like you're referring to. You can see a lot of them here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/cloud-servers http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/c...
jnoller 13y ago
Like kordless said: Completely and totally agreed. Tutorials and best practices are critical and it is probably one of my top to-do items.

DjangoReinhardt 13y ago

WHAT THE HELL, RACKSPACE?! You emailed me just because I semi-filled in your form? I didn't even click SUBMIT! o_O Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment? Did you even consider that my NOT submitting the form was a conscious decision? Maybe I realized halfway through filling the form that my skill-set wasn't good enough to make me want to sign up now? Or my finances wouldn't allow me to maintain an account on your platform after six months? Or maybe, just maybe, I just didn't want to sign up right now? Why would you take my email ID from a non-submit-clicked form and NOT tell me that you had taken it? Why? o_O Even worse, why would you email me asking 'did I forget to take my cloud'? How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?

kordless 13y ago
Using Chrome's developer tools shows the form submits your email address when it checks your username. It's possible it's going into Marketo and then you are getting emailed automatically when the record doesn't end up updating. It could be intentional, or it could be accidentally mixed with other site behaviors. I'll check on it for you and figure out what's going on. Regardless, I agree with you assertion you shouldn't be emailed if you didn't click submit. Thanks for mentioning it!
- johns 13y ago
  Are you a Racker now? Bio still mentions Loggly.
  - kordless 13y ago
    I'm a contractor. Thanks for mentioning my profile - I updated my email address to the correct one!
- DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
  Okay, I understand if the form is sending my email address to check if I am an existing customer. I can understand if it wants to check if the username I want is available. Both of these are valid actions and usually helpful for new customers. However, I can assure you that the email is intentional. Here's the text of the email: > We noticed that you started signing up for Rackspace Cloud, but you didn’t finish. Your cloud is ready for you, and it says it’s getting lonely. Apart from the cheesiness of the text and the language, one thing stands out clearly: The process that handles your form submissions knew that I didn't finish signing up. > Don’t let your cloud be lonely and sad – finish signing up for Rackspace Cloud and start using it to spin up a website, an app, or any awesome new project. > You can finish your sign-up HERE. [ed. I have removed the link associated with `HERE`] Again, ignoring the cheesiness of the text, this sentence clearly indicates that the email is triggered when someone (like me) DOESN'T finish signing up. While I appreciate your proactive attempts to acquire potential customers, this definitely veers into creepy... > If you have any questions about signing up or our products, give us a call or shoot us an email. We're here to help! One question: How do I ensure that my email is NOT added to any of your newsletters that I MOST DEFINITELY - NOW OR EVER - DID NOT SIGN UP FOR? (Apologies for the all caps. I am a little unnerved by this. I never expected RackSpace to do this sort of a thing.)

rsync 13y ago

We're not a competitor and are not in this space, so I hope it's not untoward to note that we (rsync.net) also have a FOSS/.edu/dev/HN discount: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700 ... so after you've got your environment up and running at rackspace (or wherever) you can get a similar discount for offsite backups.

jnoller 13y ago
Nice! This is excellent. We're freely hosting many OSS projects - the more FOSS/.edu/dev discounts, free tiers and benefits we can get out to the world, the better
thejosh 13y ago
rsync.net is fantastic, I use them for their HK datacenter which allows excellent speed to AU. Their email about git-annex users not submitting a single ticket was funny as well. :-)
e911 13y ago
Is there any way to protect backups from being deleted? ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups. And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups (bad backup script or evil attacker trying to delete eevrything).
- corobo 13y ago
  (not rsync, just a happy customer!) It may be a tiny bit of a chore but you can get sub-accounts set up if it's a potential problem: http://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html#7a http://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html#7a
- dspillett 13y ago
  > ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups. This seems's to be covered in the FAQ: Do you have multi-user access? Yes. You may configure additional users, at no cost, that can log in and share your account. You may control access and file permissions with standard Unix tools like 'chmod' and 'chgrp'. So you could give each content unit its own account and protect it from the others. > And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups That one is fun to arrange. Many services like rsync.net offer daily snapshots for a number of days so you can't easily kill everything in one huge cock-up, but if you don't notice a problem for weeks then all your daily snapshots prior to the problem may have expired and data therefore lost. The only real answer here is to have some form of regular checking (both automated and human powered in case the automated checking fails and fails to inform you) of your backups.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

braum 13y ago

Do you have instructions or a guide on how to migrate an existing Windows VM from Amazon to your cloud?

mariojv 13y ago
This might help: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-a-net-application-from-amazon-web-services http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-... EDIT: Also, this is a mapping of AWS resources to Rackspace resources: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of-amazon-web-services-resources-to-rackspace-resources http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of...

rsmith05 13y ago

No support for the North? Sad to see Canada not included.

jnoller 13y ago
We don't have data centers in Canada, but Chicago may have recently been annexed to Canada. So, if you are fine with using a US based cloud account, just sign up and use the Chicago region/datacenter. You, and all of Canada are welcome!
- patrickdeuley 13y ago
  I may be wrong on this, but I'm at least 60% certain that Chicago is in Canada. Correct?
  - sbarre 13y ago
    Canada wishes, if only for the restaurants..

indubitably 13y ago

rackspace ripped me off

iancarroll 13y ago
Before making bold claims, you should really state what happened and what they tried (or didn't try) to do.

chris_mahan 13y ago

What are the odds on making a very low power machine, in the 96-128 MB of RAM, for say, $1-$3/month? I like RS (have been a customer since 2008) but the minimum service is still overkill for what I like to do. I use other services like buyvm.net for low-cost machines.

philip1209 13y ago

Our student group has been in the Rackspace Startup Program, where it receives a similar discount every month. Looking at the billing records, I want to point out that the way Rackspace runs the accounting is a bit oddly - they charge my credit card the full amount, then issue a refund a few days later. On my statement, it surprised me to see a charge- keep this in mind, especially if you intend to stay under $50/month and do not anticipate charges.

jnoller 13y ago
This is handled completely differently than the startup program discounts. This is an automated discount code via the shopping cart which is applied (which is a first for us as a company).
- SwaroopH 13y ago
  Good to hear you guys have finally updated your billing system. We and many others had refused to accept the $24k sponsorship because of the insane requirement.

jread 13y ago

6 months/$300 credit - similar to the AWS 1 year free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/. Rackspace needs to upgrade their underlying years old AMD 4170/2374 hardware for cloud servers. This is a limitation for vertical scaling, and doesn't compare well to EC2/GCE/HP.

jnoller 13y ago
Are you talking about the cloud server (nova) hosts, or the dedicated gear?
- jread 13y ago
  cloud servers
  - jnoller 13y ago
    thanks - let me talk to the teams. I can't talk about migrations / upgrades publicly, but I know the teams have been working on this and thinking hard on it.
    - jread 13y ago
      That would be good - I wrote a blog post on the topic. Rackspace cloud servers CPU performance caps out low and $/CPU value isn't good on large instance types: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-performance.html#graph1_2013_05_29 http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-...

mattjaynes 13y ago

The article mentions Salt and Ansible - if you're interested in these new generation config management tools, check out my book which launches tomorrow: "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible" http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-ansible.html http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a... In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with. I definitely had some big surprises when writing the book. Spoiler: Ansible was by far the simplest, easiest to understand, and quickest to get up and going. To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-ansible.html http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

ylem 13y ago
I signed up, but no code yet...

jensenbox 13y ago

:( credit card required

jimmcslim 13y ago

Only US and UK at the moment, any chance to showing us devs down under in Australia some love? Edit: Especially since there are now .au Rackspace data centres!

jnoller 13y ago
We are working as fast as possible to expand it to the other locales as soon as we can.
- djt 13y ago
  let us know when you do!
- lemiffe 13y ago
  I am a UK national, just signed up using my UK bank account, however, I am currently living in Mexico, where I also have a bank account. Is there any chance I can change my credit card and address? I don't mind having a London (LON) server for now.
  - jnoller 13y ago
    Contact customer service: they will take care of you!

ashray 13y ago

I have to say here that I've been impressed with both the price and performance of Cloudfiles. I was using S3+Cloudfront for a long time and with cloudfiles my bills pretty much HALVED. What made the difference ? GET request pricing. Amazon S3 charges for each get request on an object, so with millions of requests on small objects, you get hit pretty hard. Also, Akamai seems to be really fast :)