Rackspace Cloud Servers

Pros Excellent customer support. Good value for price.

Cons Some interface latency. Not enough self-service automation or set-up wizards. Bottom Line Rackspace is not as polished a cloud platform as some of its competitors, but its customer support is excellent and pricing is very competitive.

By Samara Lynn

Rackspace is one of the big cloud hosting providers, along with Microsoft Azure and Amazon's EC2 platform. Rackspace is sort of the scrappy sibling of the other two. It's not as polished a platform as Azure, lacking the snazzy interface and automated, self-service wizards that let you get a cloud server up and running in minutes. Nor is it as vast a platform as Amazon's EC2, which offers a multitude of extensions and store apps. However, among the three, Rackspace's support and enthusiasm for customers is unparalleled. Plus, Rackspace has the most competitive pricing of the three. Be prepared to spend considerable time reading text guides if you're new to Rackspace and cloud platforms, however.

Getting Started
You can sign up for a Rackspace Cloud Servers account for free, but you'll need to provide a credit card to do so (as with Azure and EC2). Thirty days after you get your first server up and running, Rackspace will start charging you for uptime.

To test Rackspace, I set up a small business-size Windows Server 2012 cloud server and compared the process and pricing with Azure and Amazon EC2. Of course, all three services can do much more than this. (And I did examine some other capabilities, too.) They all offer a wide variety of services that differ from company to company. It seemed fair, then, to compare them by completing the same basic and common task of creating a hosted server. My ratings of cloud providers are, therefore, primarily based on the following factors: ease-of-use, UI navigability and user-friendliness, available support, and pricing. 

You start with Rackspace by selecting your desired service level. The Rackspace plans are the easiest to understand of the three providers I tested, and the free, basic support is far more generous than that of Azure or EC2.

The basic support included with each Rackspace subscription is called "Infrastructure Level." Rackspace recommends this level for organizations that have some in-house IT to assist them with running a cloud environment, and it's an appropriate plan for technical users. With this plan, Rackspace offers 24/7 access to its cloud-support engineers, plus assistance with coding, launching cloud servers, security, and more.

With Azure and EC2, basic support essentially gives you little more than access to community forums.

For even more white-glove support, Rackspace offers its Managed Cloud service level. For an additional (and reasonable) $100 per month plus the cost of your cloud subscription, you get immediate response to any alarms set off by your cloud server. You also get help with just about every facet of your cloud environment, including assistance with databases, FTP, SSL certificates, and security. The $100 per month additional cost still puts Rackspace's top-tier support far below the pricing for Azure and EC2's highest-level support offerings. It's a great deal.

Hosted Server Support Pricing

After you select a service level, you get an activation email to verify the account. Until you do, you can only make limited use of your Rackspace cloud control panel.

To create a cloud server, Rackspace pinpoints the data center that is geographically closest to you. The company has data centers in the U.S., Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. Being in New York, I saw in my cloud account that the server I was creating was associated with a northeastern U.S. data center.

Next, I clicked the Create Server button, and my cloud server was given an editable default name. After that, I had to select my server operating system image. I chose Windows Server 2012, but I also could have selected Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. I noticed there were no other Windows legacy servers available. If for some reason you need a hosted Windows Server 2003 instance, you'll need to look to Azure or EC2, or you will have to upload your own operating system image.

Rackspace also offers several Linux images, including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Scientific Linux, and Ubuntu. With Windows server images, you can also install SharePoint and SQL server.

View the original article here