After reading a report yesterday saying that Rackspace cloud servers were a better deal than Amazon's, I decided to check it out today.  

I don't have time to do a formal benchmark, so I created a Rackspace-hosted clone of a system that is having trouble keeping up with its workload on EC2. I chose the cheapest option on Rackspace, a 1GB 32-bit Windows 2003 server that costs $0.08 per hour, which works out to $59 per month. Significantly less than the $90 a mini-server costs on Amazon.  

The result was shocking. With the same load that pushed EC2 to it limit, CPU-wise, the Rackspace server bareley got off the baseline. So I kept adding more load to the Rackspace server. It's now doing something like 1.5 the work of the EC2 system.  

Here are the two perf monitor graphs. Remember, the second one is doing considerably more work than the first.  

I'm definitely moving that server from EC2 to Rackspace.  

Also, it seems Rackspace should do some serious benchmarks. And whatever it is that's keeping Amazon from performing like Rackspace, they should fix it.