Rackspace Wants To Take On Amazon's Cloud Computing Efforts
from the interesting-battles dept
Over the past couple of years, Amazon has successfully built up quite a business in commoditizing and renting out its server and process power through its Amazon Web Services efforts, such as S3 and EC2. These days, a lot of startups don’t even bother getting servers in a hosting facility, knowing they can just scale up on Amazon’s machines. That, of course, could represent a threat to the big hosting facilities, such as Rackspace. And while many thought the eventual competitors against Amazon in this space would come from the likes of Google or Microsoft, it looks like Rackspace is trying to be a bit proactive here. It just bought two companies and announced a competing web services platform. The two companies are Slicehost, which does virtualization, and JungleDisk, an online backup service that is built on Amazon’s S3 storage system.
The JungleDisk deal is particularly interesting, as Rackspace knows that JungleDisk users (myself included) are effectively all Amazon S3 customers. If it can offer an easy and convenient way to switch over, then it can take a bunch of customers away from Amazon and move them right over to its own platform. If you’re unfamiliar with JungleDisk, it creates a virtual mounted drive on your computer that connects to Amazon’s S3 platform. So, as long as you have internet access, you have an unlimited size hard drive that you can reach, where you pay based only on what you use. On top of that, it includes backup software (or you can use other backup software) so that you can regularly back up anything on your computer onto this network drive regularly. JungleDisk customers pay for the software, but the ongoing costs are all paid to Amazon. It’s actually quite useful (and crazy cheap compared to some other backup services). It would be interesting to see if Rackspace also allows a service to let you back up to both Rackspace and Amazon, so if one goes down, you still have access to the other. Either way, it looks like the competition in the so-called “cloud computing” space is about to heat up.
Filed Under: cloud computing, online storage, web services
Companies: jungledisk, rackspace, slicehost
Comments on “Rackspace Wants To Take On Amazon's Cloud Computing Efforts”
Rackspace?
Rackspace? RACKSPACE? They’re huge spam supporters!
Re: Rackspace?
they are not spam supporters, but they do have spam customers. someone has to pay the bills and that’s what allows them to afford giving you that fanatical service. someone is going to host spammers, it may as well be them.
They already mentioned that they will provide failover support for Amazon’s servers on the backups.
And I am not sure what Eddie above is referencing but Rackspace was great back when I used them. They really live up to the Fanatical Support slogan.
multiple cloud redundancy would be nice.
but it would also be interesting if rackspace swapped out the storage backend for something of their own.
Mosso.com
Surprised not to see mention of RackSpace’s Mosso.com
Yeah, I am surprised Mosso is ...
Yeah, I am surprised Mosso is not mentioned either. I have been migrating high traffic clients over to Mosso as of late – (Mosso is the current ‘shared hosting’ flavor of RackSpace) And their ‘scalable bandwidth on the fly’ claim works like a charm – one of my clients ( awaytogarden.com ) went from 7K unique visitors a day to 225K overnight due to a write up in the NYTimes – and the Mosso system handled it like a champ – I was very impressed.
slicehostT&Cs can leave you high & dry
The downside of slicehost is that their T&Cs would leave you high and dry for any reason, at any time, with zero notice. Why are they afraid to assure their customers that they will be treated fairly?
It seems to me, their “taking” of your data and code hosted on their server is not even legal.
Here’s the clause from: http://www.slicehost.com/tos
Slicehost may cancel or suspend your access to Slicehost services at any time and for any reason without notice. Upon cancellation or suspension, your right to use the service will stop immediately. You may not have access to data that you stored on the service after we suspend or terminate the service.
Maanged Amazon Website hosting
Rackspace has come along way. Since, it’s creation but after so many years it still has a lot more to cover. Whereas the Amazon was one of the best hosting providers and is still the among the best one as it is very quick in adopting change. However, The only problem that Amazon faces is that it is not in the reach of every person. It usually targets corporates or bigger firms whereas the new startups, and entrepreneurs are still unable to get the most of it. As, it is a very tricky job to handle AWS server.
Thankfully, now a third party host like Cloudways.
https://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php
It has step up in ensuring the ultimate AWS server experience by providing the hassle free hosting experience.