[ardell]

In my experience Rackspace is good at providing customer support on top of single managed server instances. Their Cloud Sites and Cloud Files offerings (akin to ec2 and s3) feel less than stable, and their management interface encounters unrecoverable errors many times each session. In their Chicago data center they don't allow moving backup snapshots to s3-like storage, all backups are stored with the server. This alone should be a red flag to anyone who is doing any cloud hosting. It just feels like something they're trying to get into, instead of a core competency.

Amazon on the other hand has a much more diverse offering that feels at least somewhat battle tested and polished. They offer you the ability to clone a running server with single click, backups to s3, CDN, block stores, map-reduce, etc. They've also been around for a while, which isn't proof of a good product but it gives you a better feeling that they're serious about the business of cloud hosting (not just hosting).

Not that Amazon doesn't also have its issues. I've heard multiple reports of servers simply "disappearing", which is worrisome.

[danielrhodes]

This disappearing does not happen as much anymore and they now have a lot of different tools which make recovery much faster. After awhile, you find that some of the things you need to do to protect yourself against such failures is good practice in general and using Amazon probably makes your site more reliable overall. In comparison, when I used SoftLayer, a hardware failure took down a site I had for 4+ hours while an engineer went to the machine, found out what was wrong, fixed it, etc. On Amazon, the same thing would take minutes to recover from.