5 ms·

Your pricing is insane, especially considering you provide vCPUs. I don't see why I would choose your servers over, let's say, Hetzner or Linode.

by ye 13y ago

moe 13y ago
Seconded. These prices are ridiculous even by cloud-standards. $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.
- robotmay 13y ago
  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.
  - jdubs 13y ago
    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.
    - robotmay 13y ago
      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.
    - quicksilver03 13y ago
      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.
- meritt 13y ago
  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.
- bsenftner 13y ago
  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?
  - kordless 13y ago
    This is both genius and obvious.
  - TY 13y ago
    If you don't mind sharing, where do you buy such servers for around $100? I'm thinking about setting up a home lab...
    - bsenftner 13y ago
      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.
threeseed 13y ago
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.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  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.
- agwa 13y ago
  > Also Linode is a security nightmare 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.
hhw 13y ago
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.
- kordless 13y ago
  Given you got a dedicated box with that many processors in it, how would you go about slicing them up for use?

Your pricing is insane, especially considering you provide vCPUs. I don't see why I would choose your servers over, let's say, Hetzner or Linode.

by ye 13y ago

Your pricing is insane, especially considering you provide vCPUs. I don't see why I would choose your servers over, let's say, Hetzner or Linode.

moe 13y ago

Seconded. These prices are ridiculous even by cloud-standards. $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.

robotmay 13y ago
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.
- jdubs 13y ago
  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.
  - robotmay 13y ago
    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.
  - quicksilver03 13y ago
    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.
meritt 13y ago
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.
bsenftner 13y ago
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?
- kordless 13y ago
  This is both genius and obvious.
- TY 13y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, where do you buy such servers for around $100? I'm thinking about setting up a home lab...
  - bsenftner 13y ago
    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.

threeseed 13y ago

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.

StavrosK 13y ago
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.
agwa 13y ago
> Also Linode is a security nightmare 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.

hhw 13y ago

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.

kordless 13y ago
Given you got a dedicated box with that many processors in it, how would you go about slicing them up for use?