> persistent storage: everyone has this - even Amazon now with their EBS which is way more flexible. The point is that theirs is persistent by default. You're

> persistent storage: everyone has this - even Amazon now with their EBS which is way more flexible. The point is that theirs is persistent by default. You're given a (probably sparse) filesystem on top of RAID 1+0. You can reboot the machine (or something can fail) and your data is still there. With this and static IPs you basically don't have to think about it as a special "cloud" machine and plan for failures and data loss. With Amazon EBS you pay per operation and it's a slower networked disk. If a node fails you need to bring up another and mount/configure the EBS volumes to get up and moving again. Use the right tool for the right job, of course, but for my time & money I like Rackspace's persistent storage more.