I have written about Amazon EC2 some time ago. I liked the EC2, but now I found new competitor that is better than EC2. Rackspace cloud is easier to use and has great support.

Prizing
Both Amazon and Rackspace offers virtually unlimited computing power/file storage for low cost pay-as-you-go prizing.

It looks like Rackspace offers cheaper servers. Rackspace also has small 256m server for 0.015$ and that is my most used server, because I usually don’t need big server.

Managing servers
Here is the point where the real difference becomes. Amazon has some kind of weird command line tools for managing the servers, firefox addon and a online  management console. The management console isn’t the best system, but it works. The main problem is that connecting to the server with ssh is damn difficult. It took 1hour for me first time to get the connection to the server…

Rackspace offers simple solution to connecting to the servers. They email the random server password for you. Then to can connect with normal ssh client to standart ports. No unnecessary key stuff etc. Rackspace also offers ajax console.

Support
I haven’t tried amazons support, because I haven’t a) needed help b) found where to get help

Rackspaces live support is awesome! There is always somebody to answer my questions.

In my opinion…

…Rackspacecloud is much better.

I have recently tried the Amazon EC2 service. If you don’t know what EC2 is, read this.

Prize of instance isn’t very high. If you need to run couple of heavy apps for couple of hours, it costs maybe couple of dollars. But for hosting website it is very expensive. So if you need powerful machine for quick tasks, try EC2. If you need hosting, try vps/shared hosting.

If you try EC2 I really recommend to try Elasticfox Firefox addon, because it makes managing of EC2 much easier. I also recommend to read the documentations well before booting instances. Connecting to EC2 instance via ssh is done with private-keys. This was first time I used private keys with ssh, so I first forgot to include the key when I booted my first instance.

I got my second instance running without problems and I got ssh access to root shell. After some modifications to source.list file I was able to install irssi and htop. It seems like there isn’t any limitations on ports etc.

htop running on ec2

What I will try next on EC2 is game server. As these are very powerful servers, it would be great to just boot instance with game server pre-installed and then stop it when it isn’t needed anymore. Also, a large EC2 instance would be nice render node for 3d rendering.

I may move static files of this blog to S3, but I am not sure if that speeds up my blog…

Edit: I found official management console of AWS and it looks pretty nice. Try it before Ellasticfox.