You emailed me just because I semi-filled in your form? I didn't even click SUBMIT! o_O
Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment?
Did you even consider that my NOT submitting the form was a conscious decision? Maybe I realized halfway through filling the form that my skill-set wasn't good enough to make me want to sign up now? Or my finances wouldn't allow me to maintain an account on your platform after six months? Or maybe, just maybe, I just didn't want to sign up right now?
Why would you take my email ID from a non-submit-clicked form and NOT tell me that you had taken it? Why? o_O
Even worse, why would you email me asking 'did I forget to take my cloud'? How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?
Using Chrome's developer tools shows the form submits your email address when it checks your username. It's possible it's going into Marketo and then you are getting emailed automatically when the record doesn't end up updating. It could be intentional, or it could be accidentally mixed with other site behaviors. I'll check on it for you and figure out what's going on. Regardless, I agree with you assertion you shouldn't be emailed if you didn't click submit.
> Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment?
I think that is pretty smart. There is a very good chance that people that half filled out a form, but closed down their browser wanted to register. Mountain lion kernel panics on me all of the time, so that's one case where i could get interrupted.
> How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?
That's silly. How would you ever know that anyway? One email is a little early to start worrying about spam.
Sure enough, I just got this email from a half-filled form. Seems they've had a few hours to fix it:
Subject: Oops! You Forgot to Complete your Cloud Sign-Up
Rackspace - The Open Cloud Company
Oops! You Forgot to Complete your Cloud Sign-Up
We noticed that you didn’t finish signing up for a Rackspace account. Rackspace Cloud helps thousands of customers scale their technology.
Joe runs a local pizzeria and serves thousands of customers. He uses his website to get updates and menus to his customers and fans, and host a lot of delicious images. Here’s a great example of what he can do with Rackspace Cloud:
2GB Linux Cloud Server
1GB Cloud Database
1 Load Balancer
8GB Cloud Files
1 Monitoring Check
5GB bandwidth
All of these resources keep Joe’s business constantly running for his customers. He pays about $370 a month for this configuration. And he also gets Fanatical Support®, our promise to answer questions, offer advice and help each customer.
That’s just one example of what you can do with Rackspace Cloud. Want to know more? Call us to walk through your configuration needs and get a detailed cost estimate.
Ready to get started? You can finish your sign-up HERE.
Nice! This is excellent. We're freely hosting many OSS projects - the more FOSS/.edu/dev discounts, free tiers and benefits we can get out to the world, the better
Is there any way to protect backups from being deleted?
ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups.
And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups (bad backup script or evil attacker trying to delete eevrything).
One thing, while I have the ears of you Rackspace people: offer more documentation maybe? Kind of like how Linode does: https://library.linode.com/ Common things like how to run a mail server, how to get a LAMP/LEMP/LNPP/$XYZ setup going on, etc. Not full books or anything, just stuff to get things off the ground more easily when playing around. This is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to Linode, the docs, and the support whenever I'd join their IRC channel. It was good stuff, to get things running even though this is not my field by trade.
One thing we're working on already is a knowledge base. A lot of it is product-specific, but we're accumulating an increasing number of general articles like you're referring to. You can see a lot of them here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/c...
That's an excellent suggestion and I appreciate you making it! I was thinking about cookbook examples via Vagrant and Docker, which allows a user to get an environment up quickly that can be used for the learning process.
The article mentions Salt and Ansible - if you're interested in these new generation config management tools, check out my book which launches tomorrow: "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible"
In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with.
I definitely had some big surprises when writing the book. Spoiler: Ansible was by far the simplest, easiest to understand, and quickest to get up and going.
I use Azure VMs but this post got me to check out your pricing again. You're not as expensive as I remember. In fact you look right in line with Azure and EC2.
Looks like with this program you can get a free 1 GB Linux or almost free 1 GB Windows server for 6 months anyway. Thanks for the program - it put you back on my radar.
We switched to DigitalOcean a month ago. The servers are 2x faster than rackspace (same RAM size) and we pay only half the price. DigitalOcean doesn't have all the features of rackspace (additional storage, private networks etc.), but the much better performance is everything we need.
Yes, we're actually very cost competitive for VMs - and cloud files includes a global CDN. I'm really, really, really happy this put us back on your radar. If you run into issues or have questions - [email protected] - my door is always open.
medium utilized reserved "m1.large" instance, which has 7.5Gb of RAM + 2*420Gb of local storage costs $1272 a year max (less if you don't use it all the time). If you go with heavy-utilization instance it's even cheaper. see https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#tabm1
Rackspace's 8GB/320GB instance costs $4200 a year.
I have to say here that I've been impressed with both the price and performance of Cloudfiles.
I was using S3+Cloudfront for a long time and with cloudfiles my bills pretty much HALVED.
What made the difference ?
GET request pricing. Amazon S3 charges for each get request on an object, so with millions of requests on small objects, you get hit pretty hard.
Any chance that you're going to improve the instance startup time soon? It's really bad now - even compared to a naïve setup of devstack on small spinning medium. I'm sure that lots of your customers use the latest release of ubuntu as a base image so I'd expect it is cached locally on most hosts... I don't get why it would take minutes to spawn a new instance in that case :( (Openstack dev's perspective)
Is there any possibility Rackspace may add a spot market to their product offering? Indeed if you or anyone else has any insight as to why Amazon remains (to my knowledge) the only "cloud" hosting vendor to offer spot pricing I'd be very interested.
From what I see there is no restriction if you are an existing rackspace customer to get this discount for anything new.
So you may want to consider a way that the discount can be applied on any new services signed up for in the existing cloud panel.
While it's trivial for someone to sign up for a new account, it would make more sense (for your tracking purposes) to have people just enable the discount (once again on additional services) in an existing RS cloud account.
Besides would like to just manage everything from the same account generally.
Cloud Files invalidations: Is it technically possible to make invalidations that are performed in just a couple of minutes or even seconds? That's a feature I really miss both on Cloud Files and on CloudFront.
I've signed up to about 4 different hosts recently (including Rackspace) to test them out. If I wanted to take you up on the offer would I have to sign up for a new account or can it be back dated?
Can you fix apps.rackspace email? I've been using it for 2 years now and I am unable to compose emails on iOS devices. The compose pain won't respond to the device keyboard. Otherwise great.
6 months/$300 credit - similar to the AWS 1 year free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/. Rackspace needs to upgrade their underlying years old AMD 4170/2374 hardware for cloud servers. This is a limitation for vertical scaling, and doesn't compare well to EC2/GCE/HP.
What are the odds on making a very low power machine, in the 96-128 MB of RAM, for say, $1-$3/month? I like RS (have been a customer since 2008) but the minimum service is still overkill for what I like to do. I use other services like buyvm.net for low-cost machines.
Our student group has been in the Rackspace Startup Program, where it receives a similar discount every month. Looking at the billing records, I want to point out that the way Rackspace runs the accounting is a bit oddly - they charge my credit card the full amount, then issue a refund a few days later. On my statement, it surprised me to see a charge- keep this in mind, especially if you intend to stay under $50/month and do not anticipate charges.
Is this Discount available for a limited time only or on all future signups?
I'm about to finish a project and travel for a couple of weeks so I don't anticipate myself using it anytime within the next month. As a result, if this discount is not expiring, I'd prefer delaying the signup by a month =)
The discount says it doesn't apply to cloud sites or managed cloud, but on the signup page I only see options for cloud account or managed cloud. If I select Cloud Account, will the discount still apply?
Cloud Sites is a specific product: you want to use "Cloud Account" - sorry I couldn't strip out the other options when signing up. There's some history / time there that applies.
We don't have data centers in Canada, but Chicago may have recently been annexed to Canada. So, if you are fine with using a US based cloud account, just sign up and use the Chicago region/datacenter.
[+] [-] DjangoReinhardt|12 years ago|reply
You emailed me just because I semi-filled in your form? I didn't even click SUBMIT! o_O
Why would you assume that if I semi-filled a form I would probably go ahead and register? Maybe I don't want to register at this very moment?
Did you even consider that my NOT submitting the form was a conscious decision? Maybe I realized halfway through filling the form that my skill-set wasn't good enough to make me want to sign up now? Or my finances wouldn't allow me to maintain an account on your platform after six months? Or maybe, just maybe, I just didn't want to sign up right now?
Why would you take my email ID from a non-submit-clicked form and NOT tell me that you had taken it? Why? o_O
Even worse, why would you email me asking 'did I forget to take my cloud'? How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?
[+] [-] kordless|12 years ago|reply
Thanks for mentioning it!
[+] [-] darkarmani|12 years ago|reply
I think that is pretty smart. There is a very good chance that people that half filled out a form, but closed down their browser wanted to register. Mountain lion kernel panics on me all of the time, so that's one case where i could get interrupted.
> How do I know you are not going to spam me with your promotional offers in the future? How do Iknow you are not going to sell (or worse, 'inadvertently leak') my email address to some third party?
That's silly. How would you ever know that anyway? One email is a little early to start worrying about spam.
[+] [-] spindritf|12 years ago|reply
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't get one. I expected it.
[+] [-] benatkin|12 years ago|reply
Subject: Oops! You Forgot to Complete your Cloud Sign-Up
Rackspace - The Open Cloud Company
Oops! You Forgot to Complete your Cloud Sign-Up
We noticed that you didn’t finish signing up for a Rackspace account. Rackspace Cloud helps thousands of customers scale their technology.
Joe runs a local pizzeria and serves thousands of customers. He uses his website to get updates and menus to his customers and fans, and host a lot of delicious images. Here’s a great example of what he can do with Rackspace Cloud:
All of these resources keep Joe’s business constantly running for his customers. He pays about $370 a month for this configuration. And he also gets Fanatical Support®, our promise to answer questions, offer advice and help each customer.That’s just one example of what you can do with Rackspace Cloud. Want to know more? Call us to walk through your configuration needs and get a detailed cost estimate.
Ready to get started? You can finish your sign-up HERE.
[+] [-] kmfrk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|12 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700
... so after you've got your environment up and running at rackspace (or wherever) you can get a similar discount for offsite backups.
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e911|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejosh|12 years ago|reply
Their email about git-annex users not submitting a single ticket was funny as well. :-)
[+] [-] clicks|12 years ago|reply
One thing, while I have the ears of you Rackspace people: offer more documentation maybe? Kind of like how Linode does: https://library.linode.com/ Common things like how to run a mail server, how to get a LAMP/LEMP/LNPP/$XYZ setup going on, etc. Not full books or anything, just stuff to get things off the ground more easily when playing around. This is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to Linode, the docs, and the support whenever I'd join their IRC channel. It was good stuff, to get things running even though this is not my field by trade.
[+] [-] russell_h|12 years ago|reply
One thing we're working on already is a knowledge base. A lot of it is product-specific, but we're accumulating an increasing number of general articles like you're referring to. You can see a lot of them here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-articles/c...
[+] [-] kordless|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattjaynes|12 years ago|reply
http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...
In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with.
I definitely had some big surprises when writing the book. Spoiler: Ansible was by far the simplest, easiest to understand, and quickest to get up and going.
To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...
[+] [-] ylem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 300bps|12 years ago|reply
Looks like with this program you can get a free 1 GB Linux or almost free 1 GB Windows server for 6 months anyway. Thanks for the program - it put you back on my radar.
[+] [-] fotcorn|12 years ago|reply
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indeyets|12 years ago|reply
medium utilized reserved "m1.large" instance, which has 7.5Gb of RAM + 2*420Gb of local storage costs $1272 a year max (less if you don't use it all the time). If you go with heavy-utilization instance it's even cheaper. see https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#tabm1
Rackspace's 8GB/320GB instance costs $4200 a year.
That's quite a difference
[+] [-] ashray|12 years ago|reply
I was using S3+Cloudfront for a long time and with cloudfiles my bills pretty much HALVED.
What made the difference ? GET request pricing. Amazon S3 charges for each get request on an object, so with millions of requests on small objects, you get hit pretty hard.
Also, Akamai seems to be really fast :)
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fizz_and_buzz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|12 years ago|reply
So you may want to consider a way that the discount can be applied on any new services signed up for in the existing cloud panel.
While it's trivial for someone to sign up for a new account, it would make more sense (for your tracking purposes) to have people just enable the discount (once again on additional services) in an existing RS cloud account.
Besides would like to just manage everything from the same account generally.
[+] [-] workhere-io|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beech|12 years ago|reply
Thanks!
[+] [-] zzzcpan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ujsfdo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jread|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_mahan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philip1209|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmcslim|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Especially since there are now .au Rackspace data centres!
[+] [-] desigooner|12 years ago|reply
I'm about to finish a project and travel for a couple of weeks so I don't anticipate myself using it anytime within the next month. As a result, if this discount is not expiring, I'd prefer delaying the signup by a month =)
[+] [-] kordless|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregw134|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsmith05|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnoller|12 years ago|reply
You, and all of Canada are welcome!
[+] [-] braum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mariojv|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: Also, this is a mapping of AWS resources to Rackspace resources: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mapping-of...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jensenbox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indubitably|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancarroll|12 years ago|reply