[gs8]

For most projects you won't save money by using AWS or Rackspace. You are better of with dedicated/colo servers, unless you have managed servers or rackspace servers.

For CPU intensive tasks AWS is a good option, for CDN AWS & Rackspace are both good choices depending on your needs.

I am currently using AWS, for our next project I plan on using a hybrid solution VPS/Dedicated server-AWS CDN-Rackspace CDN.

Having used dedicated servers, AWS, and Rackspace. This is how I see AWS & Rackspace.

AWS

Pros:

- Easy to add/reduce capacity

- Very powerful configurations available for CPU intensive tasks

- Inexpensive CDN with SSL & CNAME support

- Disk space can be expanded without additional RAM/CPU

- Good load balancers

Cons:

- Poor disk read/write performance [i.e. slow DB performance]

- Very expensive compared to hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy hardware)

- Disk space is very expensive

- Bandwidth is very expensive

- Instances are expensive

- No Customer Service (i'm not talking about technical support just basic customer service) unless you pay for expensive support contracts

- RAM/CPU can't be expanded without upgrading into a package you might not need

- Limited to 1 IP address per instance, which means you are limited to 1 SSL site per instance (you could use SNI, but many browsers still don't support it)

Rackspace

Pros:

- Easy to add/reduce capacity

- Better disk read/write performance than AWS

- Inexpensive Akamai CDN

Cons:

- Very expensive compared to dedicated/colo hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy hardware)

- Disk space can't be expanded without purchasing more RAM/CPU

- Cloudfiles (file storage) hosting is very expensive

- Bandwidth is very expensive

- CPU/Bundles are expensive

- CDN doesn't yet support CNAME

- IP Addresses are expensive

(This is off the top of my head, I might have missed something.)

[chrislomax]

Fantastic feedback. I would co-locate the servers but we can't afford to buy the servers. The most expensive thing is the software for us, SQL alone costs ~£6k.

Hardware itself is cheap, setup times are long and exhaustive.

I just priced up Rackspace, its not an option, well expensive. Azure is hard to price up, could they make their form any more difficult to understand??

My current dedicated hosting provider has just put our prices up another £200 a month so thats the reason for looking round. I love our host but it annoys me that if I purchased the hardware then I would save us in 6 months what we spend in a year.

It just means me spending weeks setting up the hardware etc. I can't load balance, I won't have access to a SAN. I feel tied in.

EC2 say that the package I was looking at has good disc IO. Although I can't scale it without purchasing it really

[gs8]

Didn't know you were in UK. Colo/Dedicated server costs are definitely higher than here in the US. You might want to look for another dedicated server provider rather than the cloud.

The best way to get good disk IO from EC2 is setting up using a medium or larger instance and setting up a software raid.

[chrislomax]

Thanks for the info. I was going to get the double extra large on my db server and double processor for the web servers.

Don't know what to do, I am finding myself pricing up SAN's etc this morning.

It's all down to time, I have the knowledge to do it all myself but I don't really want the responsibility. I don't want to go on holiday and the whole of our system to depend on me. I can make it as redundant as possible but as usual there is a cost behind that. More servers are more money.

We currently spend around 17k a year though on dedicated servers so to seriously save some money I would look at spending around that on actual hardware.