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I'm looking to take a dedicated server - in the process I read about Amazon Cloud computing & Rackspace Cloud Servers.

Now I'm not sure which one to opt? Could somebody suggest - Performance & Price wise.

Regards

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I would recommend that you do an actual test/evaluation of both options. They have different characteristics that are going to impact applications in different ways. A cloud server and a dedicated server are not the same thing for all types of user.

Brian Lyttle
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I've used EC2 in my previous job, where I managed 30+ instances, and I'm currently evaluating RackSpace for a future project.

As the other have said, EC2 is more expensive and more mature. One specific EC2 feature that isn't on RackSpace is suspending a server. Cloning instances is also easier with EC2.

One specific use case: Easily setup staging servers by cloning the production servers. If you have several app servers, one or more database servers, on search server, and one dedicated memcached server, putting up a staging environment that closely mirrors the production is not a trivial task. EC2 cloning makes it easy.

Also, because they're staging servers, used primarily by the QA team 9x5 and not 24x7 unlike the production servers, you can suspend them and not pay for them when they're not in use. Start 'em up on Monday morning, suspend during the evening, start up again the next day, etc. and then suspend for the entire weekend. Suspending servers is trivial with EC2, but they're not yet supported by RackSpace.

I'd recommend RackSpace for small setups with less than five servers. They're faster and cheaper. (Rackspace-sponsonred performance study: http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/)

For bigger setups, I'd recommend EC2. The sysad time savings will be huge.

radamanthus
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Amazon's EC2 is by far the most mature cloud platform with many different pricing models, but Rackspace has a great track record and looks very promising. Their windows cloud servers are still under beta testing, but their prices and performance are very good. Here is Rackspace's marketing info and here you can find a review of many different cloud providers.

Greg Bray
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It is very subjective to what you value most.

I must say that Rackspace offer more competitive prices, even compared to some of the best VPS. They have also introduced Windows support lately.

And Amazon is just like what everyone else said, it is the most mature Cloud out there, but it comes with a price. If price is not an issue for you and you value stability and reliability, I would go with Amazon cloud.

HTH.

Joshua Partogi
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In my experience, you should NOT use rackspacecloud for anything more than small workhorse-type servers that will require little setup work and keep no valuable information. I was running a server and somehow they lost my server images and were not able to recover it from the backup file in their own cloud files storage after 5 days. No way to upload a backup copy of your server images and techically unknowledgeable tech support so in case of what they called a "bug" you're out of anything you had in your servers

Servando
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