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Rackspace Raises Base Cloud Sites Pricing 50% and Reduces Overage Charges
This evening Rackspace sent a notice to all current customers of the Rackspace Cloud service (formerly Mosso) about some changes to the pricing structure for their Rackspace Cloud service.
The big change is a 50% increase in the base price for all new accounts. The old pricing had a base of $100/month and the new pricing has a base of $149/month. Current customers will remain at the previous $100/month pricing.
Rackspace notes the reasoning for the increase, “Although the price for Cloud Sites has not been changed for over three years, the cost of managing the Cloud Sites platform has increased. We felt it was necessary to update prices for new customers to reflect the value provided from the service, while still remaining very competitive versus other cloud platform as a service offerings.”
The reduction comes in a change to the overage charges which are now $0.22/GB which is a reduction from the $0.25/GB previously charged. Rackspace notes that this decrease is to align better with their other cloud service offerings.
Editor’s note: we use Rackspace Cloud for CenterNetworks and pay full price.
Hmm interesting play there. 50% increase – that’s kinda large. I always thought their $100 was expensive … but okay, obviously I’m out of touch
I wonder what percentage of sites ever hit the max – we do because something is screwed up in the setup – I haven’t had the time to work with RS on the issue.
I think $150 is a high starting point. Perhaps they need a few plan options.
I’m amazed — we suffered through four months of Mosso’s really weak service, slow pages, and downtime. Life got so much better when we moved it all to Amazon. That was not a simple process, but it was well worth it.
I’m not a snarky poster — I just want to warn other early stage companies …
Rackspace is definitely has some issues – including slow loading pages – has been bad for a few weeks.
My question is do you run your entire sites off amazon?
interesting that the price of the hosting for them has gone up when for others it has gone down.
I can see this doing nothing but hurting their uptake in new customers.
I agree about it hurting new customer sign up. I was considering the service the other day at $100 a month but it was a little too pricey. Now it is way too pricey.
Same thing here… I was planning on making the switch within the next month ! I was budgeting for 100$ (which I found a bit too pricey). Now it is WAY too much pricey. I was with my other hosting company which manage to keep the price the same for over 5 years and around 10X cheaper than Rackspace… I believe it’s bad for new customers and it’s not flexible enough for the base package. Maybe they could have 2 or 3 different startup package.
I believe this to be part of a move to save their current Cloudsite customers and ease the load of new customers until they get their act together. We’ve all been slammed with outages and node issues, it’s been one thing after another. My customers keep asking me “if RS Cloud is so scalable, why do we get ‘no nodes are available’?” Feels like the opposite of what the cloud should be. One ecommerce client finally had enough after losing sale after sale and having to man the phones when angry web customers got frustrated.
My guess, and this is purely a guess because they won’t really tell us everything, is that their problems stem primarily from their recent success in getting new customers. An explosion of customers causes all kinds of load issues that they haven’t seen. In addition, they probably got a bunch of hackers signing up and have to deal with their load hungry scripts and hacks. Add on top of that the daily DDos attacks (they’re probably a big target now – take down RS Cloud, take down Techcrunch, etc), and they’ve now got their hands full.
So, lower fees for current customers – that makes us happy, we stay. Raise fees for new customers – that deters script kiddies and slow down new resource hungry accounts and the bleeding. Does it make sense economically? Only they can answer that. They can always lower the rates and then it’d be “good” news later.
As for me, I am sticking with them because 1) it is way too painful to move all my customers again, 2) I do believe they will work this all out someday and 3) the grass is NOT always greener on the other side.
Just my 2 cents.
I have been looking at cloud sites for a few weeks and yesterday I decided I was going to go with rackspace. Today I went to sign up and low and behold it’s $50 more a month… Sucks. Can anyone recommend a similar service that is similar to cloudsites that has linux and/or linux and windows?
This is a joke. Rackspace has been having about one horrible outage every couple months for the last year, including the one last weekend (for which they still haven’t had any explanation: http://status.mosso.com/2010/01/ongoing-issues-with-cloud-sites-in-dfw-.html). And they raise prices that should fall with the economies of scale that cloud is all about. Pfeh.
I’m also a RS CS customer and I’d like to ditto what ‘RS Cloud Cust’ said.
I signed up with Mosso before they merged into the one Rackspace brand, and there was only one short period where I had a steady uptime and no downtime issues. Other than that, it’s been one big crap shoot with their DFW data center. Constant “Unable to Serve Your Request” and No Suitable Nodes Available.
I even had RS call me on my phone to tell me my site was being taken down during a peak day as they had an emergency service on the Cloud. There clearly is something they are not telling us. If the Cloud is so great, why the HECK does it keep going down?!
I will stick with RS, as I feel this is a minor short term problem. Their service is definitely amazing though, that’s one big positive they have going for them. But downtime…son of a…this is why I moved away from dealing with a dedicated server!!!
WAKE UP RACKSPACE! PLEASE GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER! /Gordon Ramsay Voice
[...] other cloud computing news, last month Rackspace raised their cloud service monthly base pricing by 50% to a base rate of $150/month and reduced their [...]
[...] an open letter to Rackspace management last month. In January Rackspace raised their Cloud Sites base pricing by 50%. Read More: Rackspace, TechCrunch, wordpress Share [...]