CLOUD FILES: COMPARE

CLOUD FILES VS. AMAZON S3

Freshbooks, Inc put Rackspace's Cloud Files head to head with Amazon's S3

"I can get someone on the phone at Rackspace. I can't even find a phone number on Amazon's Web site"

Mike McDerment - CEO, Freshbooks Inc

Freshbooks is the leader in online invoicing and bookkeeping.

1. CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK

CLOUD FILES

Rackspace has partnered with the market leader, Akamai Technologies, Inc. Akamai claims the most pervasive, highly distributed CDN platform with over 73,000 servers in 70 countries within nearly 1,000 networks.

AMAZON S3

Amazon built their own Content Delivery Network, which advertises 17 edge locations around the Globe.

2. SUPPORT

CLOUD FILES

Cloud Files™ is backed by the legendary Fanatical Support you can only get from Rackspace.

Free with Cloud Files, customers get:

1) 24x7x365 Chat/Phone/Ticket Support

2) access to The Rackspace Cloud Control Panel

3) 100% Network Uptime Guarantee

4) 100% HVAC/Power Uptime Guarantee

5) access to our forums and online resources, and much more.

AMAZON S3

To receive 24x7x365 support for Amazon S3, you pay the greater of $400 per month or 10% (scaling down) of your S3 costs. That means your support cost goes up with your S3 usage and isn’t directly related to the amount of support you use.

3. PRICE

CLOUD FILES

CDN is included in the price of Cloud Files - No Additional CDN Costs! In addition, you don’t get charged for file transfers between Cloud Files and CDN locations. Location of data does not affect pricing!

AMAZON S3

The cost of Amazon’s CDN service (CloudFront) is in addition to the cost of S3 and varies by location.

Customers are charged for “origin fetches” – data transferred from Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2 to edge locations.

4. HYBRID HOSTING

CLOUD FILES

Depending on your needs, you can get the best of both worlds with a combination of cloud products and dedicated servers. The best configuration for your business may span more than one platform. By mixing and matching Cloud Files storage with a variety of compute options, you can create the optimum solution for your business. Why settle when you can have both under one roof from Rackspace?

AMAZON S3

Amazon only offers part of the answer, with only cloud solutions. Amazon VPC is a beta service offering to connect a company’s infrastructure to Amazon’s cloud; however, Amazon does not offer hosting on dedicated/managed servers.

5. OPEN PHILOSOPHY

CLOUD FILES

In 2010, Rackspace became a founding member of OpenStack. OpenStack is an open source, collaborative software project among dozens of big players and hundreds of developers in the cloud computing space. The mission of the OpenStack community is to productize a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform.

It was launched with contributions from us here at Rackspace and the NASA Nebula cloud platform.

The Cloud Files development team created and contributed the underlying source code that has became OpenStack Object Storage software, which is the underlying software currently powering Cloud Files.

AMAZON S3

Amazon has not embraced an open-source approach for cloud interoperability.