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.