Comments on: Comparative Pricing for Virtual Hosting Providers

By: Jeffrey McManus » Price Points for VPS Hosting Services

Jeffrey McManus » Price Points for VPS Hosting Services — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:53:33 +0000

[...] Hosting Services Published by jeffrey on February 20, 2010 04:39 pm under Virtualization, Web/TechOver the past few years I’ve done a few posts highlighting the differences between various virtual hosting services, including Slicehost (which [...]

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By: Pros and cons of Adobe’s LiveCycle services in the cloud « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:41:53 +0000

[...] the actual virtual servers, even though others such as Rackspace Cloud Servers are substantially cheaper than Amazon EC2. Is that a problem? According to Adobe’s John Carione, senior enterprise product [...]

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By: jeffrey

jeffrey — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:30:52 +0000

So the difference between virtual hosting and shared hosting is that a virtual server is supposed to get a reserved or "guaranteed" portion of resources. So the scenario you describe in which the other tenants of a physical piece of hardware slow down your VM when their load goes up shouldn't happen. In fact, Slicehost promises the opposite: they allocate a certain baseline amount of RAM and CPU, and if the other users of that hardware aren't utilizing it, they'll give the excess to you. (Or so they say; no clue how this plays out in practice.)I didn't bother with CPU comparisons because I was tailoring my analysis to our most common virtualization use cases, which are not typically CPU-intensive. But I've updated the chart to include information on CPU. Rackspace and Slicehost are fairly obfuscatory with regard to how much CPU you get (they say you get a guaranteed allotment, but they don't say what that's equivalent to). It would probably make sense for somebody with better sysadmin chops than me to do some benchmarking of these VMs at some point.

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By: Nelson Minar

Nelson Minar — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:08:00 +0000

Interesting comparison, thanks!One thing you left out is CPU speed. I'm guessing by the 256 megabyte limit at Rackspace that you're getting 1/8 or maybe 1/16 of a Linux box, sharing the CPU via virtualization. That works great if the other virtual slices aren't busy 100%, say if they're serving simple web pages. It can be a problem if the host system gets overloaded.If you bump the Rackspace size out to 2048 megabytes / 80 gig disk, you get to $0.12 / hour or just about the EC2 price. So the real difference, as you point out, is that Rackspace is willing to sell a smaller slice by the hour.

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