Cloud Computing Price War to come?
Rackspace today announced they are purchasing Jungle Disk and Slice Host in an event that’s going on now.
What does this mean?
Rackspace is competing with Amazon’s Web services. Microsoft is expected to launch other similar services next week at its PDC event. Rackspace will announce several new services both today and over the next few months.
Rackspace’s employees tell me they are making their services open so that their customers can leave and go to other company’s services.
Who is Jungle Disk? They are a service that’s wholly on Amazon’s Web services right now and offer their customers backup and storage. You pay per gigabyte per month to back up your hard drive. They will announce new storage services and will give their customers a choice of using either Rackspace data centers or Amazon’s. Or both. Now you will have access to your data even if Amazon’s servers are unavailable for some reason.
Who is Slice Host? They have thousands of VPS Hosting customers who are mostly web developers who want access to super fast and super reliable cloud services. They compete pretty directly with Amazon’s EC2 services.
More as I live blog the event, keep refreshing to see more over the next hour, or watch the live event.
Earlier this year I got a tour of Rackspace’s new headquarters and met several of its leaders in a video.
DISCLAIMER: Rackspace is one of the sponsors of my blog and FastCompany.tv.
UPDATES: They just announced that Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud services, will be renamed “Cloud Sites.”
We’ll do more live blogging on FriendFeed here because that lets me interact with people a lot faster than my blog does.
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October 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 am
Perhaps too many people are trying to watch the live event, but it won’t buffer the video at our office. Guess we’ll have to wait until it’s done to learn the details.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:09 am
Lets hope they keep up the great service offered by slicehost - congratulations to both companies.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
As long as the service stays the same, we’ll stick with Slicehost.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:18 am
hmmm now I have to reevaluate using dropbox for my offsite backup backing up to 2 datacenters might be a tipping point
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:53 am
Hey
sory to write to you like this, but i could now find the contact form. I really like your blog and i was wondering if you would maybe like a link exchange with my website http://www.sayeconomy.com . It is not really that big yet as yours, since is not up so long yet, but it is gaining visitors soon and i am putting in some advertising campaign soon.
Well let me know on info@sayeconomy.com . I would really like a link exchange.
Thank you in advance for your reply.
Cheers
Matt
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:55 am
Rob,
your search engine optimization is slipping. What’s good on that?
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:27 am
Microsoft’s Online service (BPOS) is already in beta. The announcement at the PDC will most likely be the official launch date.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:28 am
As a customer of Slicehost (very happy), I just have to warn Rackspace not to f*ck it up. They are by far the best hosting company I have *ever* dealt with.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Kind of scary to think of a cloud computing price war because Amazon EC2 just seems so damn cheap. I’m excited to see what Microsoft will announce. What I’m excited about is what this means for companies selling server products. Adobe has a ton of servers that do things like enalbe real time collaboration or streaming video. Layering those on top of the various VPS options would (seem to) be an easy way to get more customer using our stuff and only paying for what they use. Makes buying our servers cheaper (in general) and gives more people more access to them at a lower, pay-as-you go price point.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Stop it with the technical posts! This is a political blog!
October 22nd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
[...] - Robert Scoble [...]
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I saw you there at the event.
From what I can gather from the various employees I talked to, the “slice” hosting is basically shared hosting, only it sounds like they’re more careful to protect you from other customers on the box. According to Rackspace, memory is the bottleneck in a shared environment, so you’re paying for a block of memory. If you have a popular site you can pay for a larger block. To me, that doesn’t sound like cloud computing, there’s only one server involved. From those employees I talked to there’s not really any virtualization/abstraction going on w/ the “slice” . I think this only adds to the confusion of what “cloud” computing is, I think part of the point of this event was to clear up some of that confusion.
Anyway, it sounds like Mosso is their actual cloud offering, I was told it’s $100/month. I don’t know how they came up with that price, I asked but didn’t get a clear answer. How does Mosso compare to MT’s grid service which is only $20? Well, they told me Mosso has a reseller interface. I personally wouldn’t use a reseller interface, I do my own billing. I talked to several Rackspace employees, none of them could guess how Mosso compares to MT’s grid, in terms of performance, price, technology. That surprised me because of MT’s popularity. At times different employees gave me conflicting answers. I think Rackspace said Mosso has a free trial, that might be a good way to compare performance, but because I can serve a million visitors/month for $20 at MT, I see no reason to spend $80 more to satisfy my curiosity.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
[...] October 22, 2008 at 7:25 pm · Filed under Cloud computing [From Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Cloud Computing Price War to come? «] [...]
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
[...] Scobleizer’s Blog wrote the same topic with me. They have invested it last few years. And it’s the time to realize it. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)the sun in the “eyes” of the office..Microsoft will soon release Windows Cloud OSOnline Productivity Suites Explore posts in the same categories: news, technology [...]
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:16 pm
They are begin to create a web-version of ms. office right?
October 23rd, 2008 at 5:25 am
[...] Cloud Computing Price War to Come? (Robert Scoble) [...]
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] over trying to come up with the best headlines for some time to come. After all we already have Robert Scoble suggesting a Cloud Computing Price War to come and Steve Clayton going with Huge Clouds Ahead. This is all very well and good but this is [...]
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I guess I will have to check out Slice Host…I mean Rackspace now…Let the wars begin…
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:14 pm
[...] the PDC days away, will we finally find out about Microsoft’s vision of The Cloud? Rackspace vs EC2 vs [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 8:09 am
[...] wait, there is more. Scoble says the company will continue making new annoucements over the next few months, so there are more shoes [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
cloud computing or “puters ptuin” ?
lol
November 16th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’ve had the chance to experiment with both Media Temple and Mosso. From a performance (grid vs. cloud file) standpoint they’ve both been perfect solutions for low traffic web sites and I haven’t had any down time issues with either company that hasn’t been scheduled maintenance. If your reselling I’d go with Mosso, they have chat available to your clients via the control panel 24/7 but if your using it to host just your sites I’d agree with PJ getting the same value with (MT).
One thing is, both of these companies tech support rock - “You can’t go wrong with either company”.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
[...] only “editorial”, it wasn’t. You can find plenty more, including here, here, and [...]