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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.
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.
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Rackspace?
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Re: Rackspace?
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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.
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but it would also be interesting if rackspace swapped out the storage backend for something of their own.
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Mosso.com
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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.
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slicehostT&Cs can leave you high & dry
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.
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