OK, I need to admit a little bias here; my company (on my recommendation) went with Rackspace for our SaaS offering.
That being said, I was faced with a dilemna a few weeks ago. I needed to quickly procure a web site with a vital and graphical message ("our house is for sale") and I needed to do it in such a way that my CFO/CMO was happy (wife controls costs and writes copy for any such venture). Technology choice? Easy; Joomla and the underlying technologies of PHP and mySql.
So, I knocked up a site on one of my many in-house Ubuntu VMs (LAMP on VM Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 LAMP on what-can-go-wrong-I'm-a-professional) and it was great(tm). Uh. Until I tried to access it from anythingt that was not already the (home) site that I was trying to sell. Yep; those 4MB sexy images, especially in supa-slideshow-format, could not compress into my 12Mb/s download / 384Kb/s upload ADSL stream.
Sh*t; I try to spend as little as I can on bandwidth but we want to get many £000s of sales value </compute>
Time to look for a commercial supplier at not too stupid a cost. I looked far and wide and I initially discounted Rackspace cos they are the incumbent, high-end, we-do-the-service supplier… Then I went back and had a cold hard look and their new cloud costs actually seem very reasonable.
Rackspace have a variety of easy to understand cost models;
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| 256 MB | 10 GB | $0.015 | $10.95 | — | — |
| 512 MB | 20 GB | $0.03 | $21.90 | — | — |
| 1,024 MB | 40 GB | $0.06 | $43.80 | $0.08 | $58.40 |
| 2,048 MB | 80 GB | $0.12 | $87.60 | $0.16 | $116.80 |
| 4,096 MB | 160 GB | $0.24 | $175.20 | $0.32 | $233.60 |
| 8,192 MB | 320 GB | $0.48 | $350.40 | $0.58 | $423.40 |
| 15,872 MB | 620 GB | $0.96 | $700.80 | $1.08 | $788.40 |
That's it! I worked out what I wanted, which was the lowest of the low at 256MB and 10GB and my cost is $10.95
Then they add (ridiculously low) bandwidth charges of;
| Bandwidth Out | 22¢ / GB |
| Bandwidth In | 8¢ / GB |
So what does this add up to? My LAMP server (with heavy bandwidth for the photo upload / download) has cost me $12.95 for the last two months.
£9!!! I haven't even gone into the capacity, availability and resillience factors that caused my employers to go with Rackspace. We've been using them for 12 months now and, honestly, they are a breath of fresh air; they treat us as if we understand what we are talking about, they make recommendations, they will debate these recommendations and, ultimately, they will act according to the best intentions of their customers.
There's a long way between the service that my employers pay and the $12.95 I pay for my personal server, but I honestlly have not seen a difference in service between the two offerings.
So… if you are trying to figure out where to send your £10, £25, £100 or £250 a month, please consider Rackspace. Enterprise quality service for the masses.
I would have to agree Rackspace hosting is a solid choice, we support a number for clients hosting on Rackspace dedicated servers and often have to discuss changes with them, each time they are knowledgeable and courteous and certainly as you said Scott they don't condescend.
Just rediscovered one the day-in-a-life videos they put together a while ago and looks quite a nice place to work too.
http://www.rackertalent.com/people/a-day-in-the-life-rackspace-support/
Cheers Jonathan – yep, they have won award for the last couple of years for being in the Sunday Times top 100 places to work in the UK.