It feels like Rackspace is grasping at straws to differentiate their products from the competition.<p>Examples:<p>oversold-nature: this is common in OpenVZ setups and some others, but not Xen and at least Amazon and Linode are both on Xen (as are prgmr and ChunkHost). You have your dedicated resources.<p>instant-provisioning: Linode and Amazon both have this for the most part and it's true that Linode might not have the capacity to launch 100s of instances at once all the time, but that isn't a consideration for most.<p>cloning: I know this can be accomplished with Amazon and I'm pretty sure with Linode as well (might be a support ticket, though).<p>no bloatware: I haven't used a VPS provider that had it.<p>persistent storage: everyone has this - even Amazon now with their EBS which is way more flexible.<p>hourly billing: not something that most need, but it is an advantage over Linode.<p>utility bandwidth: basically a way for them to charge you high prices for bandwidth.<p>resource granularity: an advantage over Amazon, but most VPS providers are in line with Rackspace.<p>--<p>Rackspace has a good service with a great history (both as Cloud Servers and as Slicehost), but this article is trying to create product differentiation where there isn't really much. Slicehost/Rackspace haven't reduced pricing since it was introduced over 3 years ago and they're trying to maintain a premium position as Amazon reduces their prices, Linode becomes a larger competitor, and lots of other smaller companies try to enter the space. That requires product differentiation.
This story was [dead]-ed once already since it's clearly nothing more than an ad for Rackspace Cloud. Apparently an effective one. Before you upvote, take a look at the 'story' here.
From what I can tell, SoftLayer's offerings are similar and the prices are better when compared to Rackspace Cloud. $99 at SoftLayer gets 250GB of storage and 2000GB of bandwidth while it gets only 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth at Rackspace Cloud.<p><i>"Utility billing is essential for any Cloud platform and something else you will not find from a VPS provider. You pay for your server instances on a per hour basis, so if you only need an instance for a certain amount of days/weeks that is all you pay for."</i><p>SoftLayer does this, although they call each instance a "CCI" (cloud computing instance) instead of VPS.
Interesting that there is no mention of Slicehost. I wonder if Slicehost will exist in the longterm or will it's customers get folded into the Rackspace Server offering.<p>Coincidently, I'm in the process of searching for a host and am close to selecting Slicehost.