Rackspace (via Mosso) to Launch Cloud Servers at 1.5 cents/hour ($10.95/month) Monday

http://blog.mosso.com/2009/03/breaking-news-mosso-the-rackspace-cloud-announces-availability-of-cloud-servers-and-more/

by mdasen • 17 years ago

71 34 17 years ago

blog.mosso.com

timf5• 17 years ago

They say "click here for details" but it has no more information, unfortunately: http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp

My guess is that this is going to be a pretty small box meant to pique people's interest and get them looking at the price sheet, something like 64MB or 128MB RAM.

Personally I have a use for changing numbers of many small nodes like that, dependent on the bandwidth situation at least. Getting things down to this small of a slice means you can really optimize certain tasks.

streety• 17 years ago

The details are:

Here are the different plans available along with pricing per hr.

  * 256 MB (20GB Storage) $0.015
  * 512 MB (40GB Storage) $0.03
  * 1 GB (60GB Storage) $0.06
  * 2 GB (80GB Storage) $0.12
  * 4 GB (160GB Storage) $0.24
  * 8 GB (320GB Storage) $0.48
  * 15.5 GB (620GB Storage) $0.96

bandwidth will run $0.08 per GB for the incoming and $0.20 per GB for the outgoing

OSs available:

  * Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
  * Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) LTS
  * Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
  * Gentoo 2008.0
  * Centos 5.2
  * Fedora 10
  * Arch 2007.08

The folks behind the live chat aren't keeping these details secret. I've no idea why they aren't on the web page.

kylec3• 17 years ago

Thanks for posting these. I'm currently using the lowest tier of Slicehost, but it sounds like I can easily halve my costs with this new service without a decrease in RAM or storage. I hope Rackspace will make it easy to move from Slicehost to this new cloud service (both of which they own).

The only thing that sounds rather odd is that they're charging more for outgoing traffic than incoming traffic - most websites send much more data than they receive, so I would think that Rackspace would configure their network and their prices accordingly. Granted, this cloud compute service doesn't have to be used for websites, but Rackspace has traditionally been a web hosting company.

dawson• 17 years ago

Just to let you guys know, #slicehost staffer are reporting those storage prices as incorrect.

davepeck• 17 years ago

At first blush, this looked far cheaper than EC2.

But, actually, it's the 2GB Mosso machine (at 12 cents/hour) that's most comparable to the EC2 Small Instance (at 10 cents/hour). The EC2 Small Instance has twice the local storage, but a little less RAM.

So, they're roughly comparable, with Amazon perhaps coming out a tad ahead in price.

That said, I think offering S (1GB), XS (512MB), and XXS (256MB) sizes is a great idea that could be a solid differentiator for Mosso.

pantsd• 17 years ago

The existence of a low end instance in addition to some higher end instance availablity options is pretty awesome, this makes it cheap enough for something which you might only really need VPS level availability to make sense to build on top of their platform and then if you need a bunch of instances all at once ok to fire up. They have quotes on the site like "I couldn't even find Amazon's phone number" which seem a bit miss-leading (Amazon simply charges for phone support), but yay for competition :)

ssanders82• 17 years ago

Word of warning: I used their $100/mo server cloud as my host for a while, but repeated downtime issues forced me to leave.

midnightmonster• 17 years ago

I run two such accounts starting several months ago. I'm infuriated by some quirks of their site management system,* but the reliability has been good. I think they've gotten better.

* Especially: It's impossible to move a site from one account to another, or even from one client to another client in the same account, or even from no client to a client in the account. Impossible. They can't/won't even do it for you on the backend.

Compare to telling the mail system that your mail is somewhere else. DNS you can do yourself, mail server you have to ask them to do if you want other mosso users to be able to send to you. That's a reasonable compromise IMO.

jonmc12• 17 years ago

Yea, we've had problems too - I've consistently benchmarked their cloud sites servers with a load time 5-8x slower than other hosts.

pj• 17 years ago

The difference is, other hosts will crash under load and you'll lose all your requests. Mosso is like a train and other hosts are motorcycles. It's slower but can haul way more tonnage.

mikeyur• 17 years ago

I was going to go with them back in the day but the biggest turn off was no SSH access. Seriously, wtf?

wmf2• 17 years ago

Keep in mind that Cloud Sites and Cloud Servers are completely different; they were developed by different companies.

hbien• 17 years ago

After reading two paragraphs, I wanted to know how many times they used the word "cloud" on that page. It's 72: http://twitpic.com/21an7

patio11• 17 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if people are perhaps drinking a little too much of the cloud KoolAid. This is one of those times.

I had somebody from Microsoft once tell me, in apparent seriousness, that I should cloudify my program. Because it would offer me unprecedented scalability and uptime, and let my customers access their data from anywhere.

sigh You see this tool right here? It is called a hammer. It is useful for many things. You see this problem right here? It is an ingrown toe-nail. Please do not attempt to fix the ingrown toe-nail with the hammer. It will not work out well.

asnyder• 17 years ago

It would be nice if they had a comparison document detailing the differences between the Cloud Servers and their Slicehost service. I currently have a handful of slices, all of which might benefit from these offerings. However, I know with the Slicehost offerings I have persistent storage, bandwidth, etc. However, I don't normally use all my bandwidth or storage.

It would also be nice to know if they have any details regarding whether this will be integrated into Slicehost's Control Panel, or products, to allow easier migration, scaling, etc.

mdasen• 17 years ago

Well, I think the idea is that those details are coming on monday. But there are some details that we can know now since Cloud Servers is mostly just Slicehost combined with Mosso/Rackspace's support/billing channels. So, they'll be Xen instances with persistent storage. Right now the bandwidth question is up in the air since the site doesn't specify. Given the pricing, I'd have to assume some bandwidth would be included. At $700, their 15.5GB server wouldn't look so nice against an $800 slice that came with 2,000GB of bandwidth (which would cost $400 at $0.20/GB).

They'll probably be integrating this with the Mosso control panel.

EDIT: So, talking with the Mosso support, bandwidth is not included and it will cost 22cents outgoing. Makes the pricing look a lot less appealing against Amazon's EC2 - especially since Slicehost's previous key (persistent storage) is negated by EBS.

Mosso's live help is answering any questions you have and they seem decently knowledgeable. The information doesn't seem to be embargoed at all by Rackspace.

bcx• 17 years ago

Any word on whether these will be 32 bit or 64 instances. Slicehost's ram is far less "efficient" than linode, and you only really need 64bit for addressing ram anyway.

listic• 17 years ago

What do you mean by "Slicehost's ram is far less "efficient" than linode"?

moe4• 17 years ago

He probably means that slicehost only offers 64bit VMs which causes some memory overhead.

melvinram2• 17 years ago

Just had a chat with a great rep from Rackspace named Will Conway:

SUMMARY:

* Same as SliceHost except pricing is hourly, instead of monthly

* 1GB Slice = $43.80/mo

* Upgrade/downgrade whenever you want

* For questions, contact Will at 210-312-5181 or wconway@mosso.com

* You get root SSH access, just like SliceHost

FULL THING: ===========

Will: Hi welcome to Mosso the Rackspace cloud. How can I help you? May I also get your name and email address just in case we get disconnected?

you: Hello

you: Melvin Ram, melvin@volcanicmarketing.com

you: Is Cloud Servers the same as slicehost?

Will: Nice to meet you Melvin

Will: it's a little different

Will: so with slicehost you're locked in to bandwidth

Will: cloud servers is on a utility model with bandwidth

Will: slicehost you're paying montly

Will: monthly*

Will: cloud servers is hourly

you: I currently have a 1gig slice with slice host and it's way under the bandwidth limits... how much would that cost with Cloud Servers? And will I get the same type of root access?

Will: you will get the same root access

Will: 1 GB (40GB Storage) $0.06 hourly, $43.80 monthly you: can I upgrade a server to a larger server and then shrink back down at a later time?

Will: sure, and you wont have to reupload anything just like with slicehost you: Will this be replacing slicehost?

Will: nope

Will: you'll still have slicehost if you want it

Will: this is just a little extra : )

you: Is there any reason someone would want to stay with SliceHost and not migrate to this?

you: especially since I'm assuming both system will have access to exact same hardware and network

Will: simply a comfort factor I think

Will: if you already know it

Will: but to me cloud servers is going to be the way to go

you: it's almost half the cost for exact same thing... a little pain for 200% ROI makes sense

you: anyway, thanks for the info

you: I'll be switching soon

Will: great, thanks for keeping it in the family : )

you: I was thinking of switching to heroku but I might just think twice

you: heroku is based on the AWS system

Will: Great, that's what we were going for

Will: Booooo AWS

Will: we're faster anyway : )

Will: and we specialize in hosting not books....

Will: So I see you're in marketing

Will: do you have some rather large projects that you may need this for, or just to run day to day stuff

you: small stuff for now

Will: cool, just checking : )

Will: I'll get that email out to you

you: Right now, the main app is www.BrainBankhq.com

you: its in it's infancy right now

you: Zero paying clients

you: but a lot of people promising to start using it once I add ability to charge people for the content.

Will: gotta start somewhere right

you: Yep... they'll all be membership-based websites so I'm assuming that a few of them will turn to be much better than most of them... so it's just a matter of seeing where it goes.

you: And just refining it so it's simple

Will: so what's this for, kind of link Junto with Ben Franklin?

you: huh?

you: reading about it on wikipedia... gemme me a sec

Will: Junto was a group that eventually evolved into the University of Philadelphia...basically a think tank

you: Well some of the membership sites may turn into that but it wasn't the original intent.

you: Originally, I wanted to create an app that I could use to take down notes for my chemistry class and sell it future students.

Will: ah, yes that would be very useful

you: yea, but I didnt know how to do credit card processing so I made it so it would be offer free content

you: I figured it would be a lead-gen tool

you: content creators don't like that idea

you: Or at least I haven't explained it well enough for them to like the idea.

Will: I'm sure you'll get through to them : )

you: anyway, I've come across enough people who want to create membership-based content sites that it makes sense to give it a try to go that direction

you: Btw, did you get a chance to send over that stuff?

Will: have you looked at cloud servers to host this

Will: it's a little more scaleable

you: It's on Slicehost for now

Will: just sent it

you: I'll move it here soon

you: You don't mind if I share it with a few friends to pass on the new, do ya?

Will: not at all

Will: feel free to give them my email address if they have follow up questions

Will: or they can call me direct at 210-312-5181

Will: my name is Will Conway

you: Gotcha! Thanks Will!

Will: my pleasure

you: Wait, one more Q

you: It obviously comes with SSH, right?

Will: correct

Will: you'll have full command line access

you: Just like SliceHost

Will: you bet

Will: Slicehost is the foundation of cloud servers so you'll find that it's all very similar

you: Gotcha

rw• 17 years ago

You clearly are in marketing!

melvinram2• 17 years ago

haha I'm not quiet sure how to take that, so I'll assume it's a compliment. Thanks!

chiffonade• 17 years ago

This cloud stuff sounds great!

I can't wait to use it in 5 years when it's reliable.

Rackspace (via Mosso) to Launch Cloud Servers at 1.5 cents/hour ($10.95/month) Monday

Related Stories