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Rackspace’s cloud servers go live Monday

Tony Chan | March 16, 2009 | 0 Comments

Rackspace Hosting is launching pay-as-you-go server instances as part of its cloud services offering today. The Cloud Servers service, offered through the company’s Mosso division and hosted out of the company’s main US data centre, will allow access to on-demand server compute capacity over the Internet for US$0.015 (one and a half cent) per hour, or US$10.95 for a full month of usage.

Rackspace’s offering is expected to compete directly with the cloud computing offering from Amazon Web Services. As part of the latest enhancements to its cloud service portfolio, Rackspace also took its online storage service, Cloud Files, out of the beta phase.

“Cloud Servers provides inexpensive compute capacity that can be instantly sized to meet your needs, so you never again have to deal with planning and predicting lead times,” Rackspace said. “From the same control panel that you use to interact with Cloud Sites and Cloud Files, you can run anything you please on your favourite Linux distribution – Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Centos, Fedora and Arch.”

The cloud offering now allows its customers to reduce cost as well as improve utilization of server investment.

“Billing is calculated on an hourly basis – not monthly – so you pay only for what you use. You can forever say goodbye to high hosting bills that cover what’s mostly unused, just-in-case capacity,” the company said.

Additional bandwidth cost components of 8 cents and 22 cents for bandwidth coming in and out of the Rackspace cloud is also applicable to the Cloud Server service.

Cloud Servers and Cloud Files adds to Rackspace’s Cloud Sites offering, which it claims is already one of the largest cross-platform solutions in the platform as a service (PaaS) market following its acquisition of SliceHost and Jungle Disk in October 2008. Cloud Sites hosts more than 100,000 applications on its infrastructure, including many high profile web sites, and serves up ‘billions and billions of page views each month,’ according to Rackspace.

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