Rackspace's entry into the cloud computing market with Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso) signals the growing maturity of cloud hosting beyond Amazon's early dominance. The hosting industry is rapidly evolving as established providers add cloud offerings alongside their traditional dedicated server and managed hosting products.
A More Competitive Cloud Landscape
Rackspace differentiates itself with its trademark Fanatical Support, offering managed cloud services that appeal to businesses wanting cloud flexibility with dedicated assistance. Their Cloud Servers product competes directly with EC2 by providing on-demand virtual machines, while Cloud Files offers object storage similar to Amazon S3.
This competition benefits customers through lower prices, improved features, and more choices. GoGrid, Linode, and Slicehost (acquired by Rackspace) are also expanding their cloud offerings, each targeting different segments of the market. The open-source OpenStack project, co-founded by Rackspace and NASA, aims to create an open cloud infrastructure platform that any provider can deploy.
For hosting customers evaluating cloud options, the expanding market means more opportunity to find a provider that matches their specific needs for performance, support level, geographic presence, and pricing model. The era of cloud lock-in to a single provider is giving way to a healthier ecosystem with portability and choice.