Comparison of Rackspace, DigitalOcean and Amazon IaaS

We test all the existing cloud computing services without affiliate link. We definitely can compare Rackspace, DigitalOcean and Amazon IaaS. There are clearly two groups – one group is shouting “DigitalOcean is a threat to Amazon IaaS” and the other “DigitalOcean Does Not Really Compete With Amazon IaaS”, but what is the real feel? Most importantly, can DigitalOcean be compared with Rackspace Cloud’s service with the managed layer?

You Should Know Something For Comparison of Rackspace, DigitalOcean and Amazon IaaS

The most progressive, most polite on social profiles among all the Cloud Services is none of these three, it is Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift is a PaaS and should not be compared, but one can expect a bigger blow from Red Hat on IaaS part. Support of Rackspace for technical part is the best, their worst part is the billing department – if a small money, a fraction is yet pending out of the whole bill, they will not care how much the client paid since 2011. You can read our review of Rackspace from 2011. Rackspace has the best infrastructure, best persons, the charge we think is the right, but the billing department is kind of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice ! Shylock part will be only be felt if you are from India, the excellent co-operative service provided by ICICI Bank ( pun intended ) is enough to create pain in depositing money to Credit Card. They are a bit mechanical. May be they face too much issues that has changed them to behave mechanically.
But, it is also true that, Rackspace is honest about returning money too – its undeniable a difficult process. Our view about Rackspace has not been changed in 2014 – Why is Rackspace So Successful.

In order to compare, you must know few things :

1. Cloud Computing Service Models
2. SLA and Cloud Computing Services
3. Our initial impression about DigitalOcean Cloud Servers
4. Why Cloud Consulting is Required

MediaTemplate was very much popular for high end servers – practical competitor of Rackspace until engulfed. The basic reasons were – good quality of service and co-operation with the good blogs – good example is CSS Tricks. Practically for quality, websites like us has very few options for web hosting.

The charge goes higher not due to Rackspace, this fault is of PHP and MySQL combination – the wh*re was not really written for powering the real powerful websites. PHP – Personal Home Page. If you use OctoPress or Jekyll, the cost will go down. Rackspace themselves use OctoPress for dev blog. They also needs to pay the cost of infrastructure!

Comparison of Rackspace, DigitalOcean and Amazon IaaS

Rackspace, honestly is the standard in Cloud Computing. With the current services, it is kind of first generation software defined data center. Amazon, honestly can not be compared with their huge downtime, lesser options of Operating System, a closed source software model.

DigitalOcean is the newest member; yet it has points which made us to think they are a competitor or rather a second option to Rackspace for the consumers with very low budget. As DigitalOcean has only limited Cloud Services – practically Cloud Servers, real comparison can not be done with the rest two.

Obviously, the structure of charge for any Cloud Server has two parts – cost of running the server plus cost of bandwidth. Rackspace and DigitalOcean both follows it quite transparently. DigitalOcean has coupons – great to use for small deployments and creating tuts. What is the problem to change the account to apply coupon for test instances or creating tuts. Practically for PaaS – Heroku Cloud or OpenShift its free.

DigitalOcean’s Apps is kind of equivalent to Rackspace Deployment. Both DigitalOcean and Rackspace are pure Linux powered, Rackspace has Micro (and) Soft Windooooz option to spin, DigitalOcean does not have. We never spinned Windooooz on Rackspace, although there is custom boot option to load Windooooz like OS for free. Well, DigitalOcean is not so experienced like Rackspace, it is fact that; if they had to pay big names, the charge would go up. DigitalOcean is quite good option when it is about a subdomain like SVN or git or a small website which will not require a loadbalancer. We calculated, it is not economical to use DigitalOcean’s server plus Rackspace’s Load Balancers – it will increase the cost as Rackspace does not charge for bandwidth used within their network (servicenet). We do not know why, DigitalOcean’s 512 MB instance is quite faster on SSH versus Rackspace’s one. DigitalOcean will be costly, if you are going to install lot of softwares – Rackspace has most on their own repo – charge is zero for bandwidth.

Right now, we think both Rackspace and DigitalOcean punch is required for seriously running websites – combination cn decrease cost. Amazon is worst among all among these three. We do not think that DigitalOcean has the target audience like that of Rackspace. Why spend $40 for git when DigitalOcean can offer at $10? Since 2011, we had no suitable alternative to Rackspace for creating tutorials, with DigitalOcean we have it. We can not say about downtime about DigitalOcean as we do not use their service seriously so far.