Last year, Rackspace, one of the largest web hosting companies going, went and bought a few smaller companies to add to its stable of cloud-based offerings, which to that point had consisted of Mosso. One of these was Jungle Disk, which I use for backups and file storage on Amazon S3. The other was Slicehost.
Mosso’s offerings were pretty straight-forward. For $100 a month you got a server you could develop your application on in a variety of languages and they would automatically handle scaling your app as needed. We tried it out for a bit and it worked well and as advertised.
Yesterday, Rackspace announced several new offerings, but one in particular caught my eye – their Cloud Servers product.
Cloud Servers will be priced per instance hour and will start at $0.015 per hour ($10.95 for a full month of usage). Since you only pay by the hour, it will be really easy and affordable to spin up a new instance for testing or development—and then simply remove it when you’re done.
$11 a month for a cloud server with 256 MB of RAM and 10GB storage space? Sign me up right this second. These servers will be available starting Monday, March 16. I will try them out and report back how they are. Here are additional costs and specs. Click for a larger version.
I wonder how Amazon will respond to this?
You can read more about their cloud servers and Rackspace’s other announcements here.
I have been using Mosso Cloud Servers to build out an old EC2 app that i was working. Even using the 256mb service. The performance was much much much better then that of Ec2.
Don’t get me wrong. EC2 is great for what it does. However, for a developer starting out and looking to build out their app without learning any major concepts is great.
And i for one really appreciate the Cloud Servers.
A must try for newbie devs