Rackspace Wants To Take On Amazon's Cloud Computing Efforts

from the interesting-battles dept

Over the past couple of years, Amazon has successfully built up quite a business in commoditizing and renting out its server and process power through its Amazon Web Services efforts, such as S3 and EC2. These days, a lot of startups don't even bother getting servers in a hosting facility, knowing they can just scale up on Amazon's machines. That, of course, could represent a threat to the big hosting facilities, such as Rackspace. And while many thought the eventual competitors against Amazon in this space would come from the likes of Google or Microsoft, it looks like Rackspace is trying to be a bit proactive here. It just bought two companies and announced a competing web services platform. The two companies are Slicehost, which does virtualization, and JungleDisk, an online backup service that is built on Amazon's S3 storage system.

The JungleDisk deal is particularly interesting, as Rackspace knows that JungleDisk users (myself included) are effectively all Amazon S3 customers. If it can offer an easy and convenient way to switch over, then it can take a bunch of customers away from Amazon and move them right over to its own platform. If you're unfamiliar with JungleDisk, it creates a virtual mounted drive on your computer that connects to Amazon's S3 platform. So, as long as you have internet access, you have an unlimited size hard drive that you can reach, where you pay based only on what you use. On top of that, it includes backup software (or you can use other backup software) so that you can regularly back up anything on your computer onto this network drive regularly. JungleDisk customers pay for the software, but the ongoing costs are all paid to Amazon. It's actually quite useful (and crazy cheap compared to some other backup services). It would be interesting to see if Rackspace also allows a service to let you back up to both Rackspace and Amazon, so if one goes down, you still have access to the other. Either way, it looks like the competition in the so-called "cloud computing" space is about to heat up.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: cloud computing, online storage, web services
Companies: jungledisk, rackspace, slicehost


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Eddie Pasternak, 22 Oct 2008 @ 5:46pm

    Rackspace?

    Rackspace? RACKSPACE? They're huge spam supporters!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      mister m, 22 Oct 2008 @ 7:48pm

      Re: Rackspace?

      they are not spam supporters, but they do have spam customers. someone has to pay the bills and that's what allows them to afford giving you that fanatical service. someone is going to host spammers, it may as well be them.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Ben, 22 Oct 2008 @ 7:10pm

    They already mentioned that they will provide failover support for Amazon's servers on the backups.

    And I am not sure what Eddie above is referencing but Rackspace was great back when I used them. They really live up to the Fanatical Support slogan.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Rob Friedman, 22 Oct 2008 @ 10:47pm

    multiple cloud redundancy would be nice.

    but it would also be interesting if rackspace swapped out the storage backend for something of their own.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    pwb, 22 Oct 2008 @ 11:14pm

    Mosso.com

    Surprised not to see mention of RackSpace's Mosso.com

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Kit Latham, 23 Oct 2008 @ 6:16am

    Yeah, I am surprised Mosso is ...

    Yeah, I am surprised Mosso is not mentioned either. I have been migrating high traffic clients over to Mosso as of late - (Mosso is the current 'shared hosting' flavor of RackSpace) And their 'scalable bandwidth on the fly' claim works like a charm - one of my clients ( awaytogarden.com ) went from 7K unique visitors a day to 225K overnight due to a write up in the NYTimes - and the Mosso system handled it like a champ - I was very impressed.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    David Wall, 21 May 2009 @ 4:04pm

    slicehostT&Cs can leave you high & dry

    The downside of slicehost is that their T&Cs would leave you high and dry for any reason, at any time, with zero notice. Why are they afraid to assure their customers that they will be treated fairly?

    It seems to me, their "taking" of your data and code hosted on their server is not even legal.

    Here's the clause from: http://www.slicehost.com/tos

    Slicehost may cancel or suspend your access to Slicehost services at any time and for any reason without notice. Upon cancellation or suspension, your right to use the service will stop immediately. You may not have access to data that you stored on the service after we suspend or terminate the service.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Alice Metcalf, 20 Jun 2019 @ 3:13am

    Maanged Amazon Website hosting

    Rackspace has come along way. Since, it's creation but after so many years it still has a lot more to cover. Whereas the Amazon was one of the best hosting providers and is still the among the best one as it is very quick in adopting change. However, The only problem that Amazon faces is that it is not in the reach of every person. It usually targets corporates or bigger firms whereas the new startups, and entrepreneurs are still unable to get the most of it. As, it is a very tricky job to handle AWS server.
    Thankfully, now a third party host like Cloudways.
    https://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php
    It has step up in ensuring the ultimate AWS server experience by providing the hassle free hosting experience.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.