Atomia vs Rackspace Cloud Sites

We truly admire hosting companies such as Rackspace, and want our clients to be able to offer functionality similar to them and other leading providers. This is what Rackspace says about their Cloud Sites service and how it compares to the Atomia platform.

Atomia - Rackspace
Clustered Website Hosting

Atomia (BETA)

Atomia automatically spreads the traffic among all nodes in all available web server clusters to minimize any performance issues. Not only that, depending on your preferences and the type of service your customer has purchased, you can either put a cap on resources, use all nodes available to you, or even deploy new nodes automatically to handle traffic spikes.

Rackspace

Rackspace Cloud Sites spreads your traffic among a cluster of servers. Your websites scales automatically without issues such as bad performance, common with shared hosting.
Instant website provisioning

Atomia

All Atomia setups are load balanced with a shared storage layer and real-time replication of website data for maximum performance and security. Also, all relevant traffic is passed through a web accelerator for maximum throughput. Through your order page or control panel, end-customers can get a new website up and running in just seconds.

Rackspace

A new website backed by Rackspace Cloud is up in less than five minutes. Functionality such as load balancing, clustering and redundant storage is automatically inherited by your application.
Usage-based hosting plans

Atomia (BETA)

Atomia includes real-time CPU, disk I/O and memory resource measurement on a customer account basis. This data is used to automatically deploy new web server nodes if your customer offers allow it. This functionality allows you to offer customers a service that grows (or shrinks) depending on their needs, and you can use this to charge them only for what they actually use, or have premium customers allocate reserved capacity for traffic spikes.

Rackspace

Your site is instantly backed by clustered cloud computing technology, as soon as you upload it. If your site needs more resources than what is included, you only pay a small scale pricing for what you actually use.
No code modifications

Atomia

The Atomia auto-scaling and resource assignment functionality require no end-user code modifications.

Rackspace

Rackspace Cloud Sites lets you run any application with no, or few, modifications, while many other cloud hosting platforms require custom code and architecture.
Cloud Sites vs Shared Hosting
Scalability

Atomia

With Atomia, all sites may be served by any or all nodes of every available web server cluster. As a hosting provider, you can of course configure this. Depending on your preferences and end user offerings, you may either allow your customer sites to maximize your available resources, automatically cap resources for individual accounts, or allow them to scale and charge for the extra resources needed.

Rackspace

With a rather seasonal site, we get hit with lots of traffic all at once. This can often overwhelm a shared hosting server. However, with Rackspace Cloud Sites, our site is served by an entire cluster of servers, and the service is automatically adding more if necessary.
Reliability

Atomia

The Atomia platform does not limit you in how you set up your environment, allowing you to provide redundant storage and automatic real-time replication of data to in-house or external data units for maximum security. Atomia also supports settings and configurations that allow you to load balance entire infrastructures between different data centers so that if one data center becomes unresponsive, another one (with up-to-date replicated data) automatically takes over.

Rackspace

The Rackspace Cloud Sites platform is fully clustered and redundant. Files are stored on multiple hard drives in multiple locations. If one server fails, the others pick up the load and none of our visitors are affected.
Linux vs. Windows

Atomia

Atomia supports full mixing and matching of web server platforms for all added websites. Customers can easily select which platform should serve a whole site, or parts of it. Included in the Atomia platform is support for Apache, IIS and Litespeed and multiple configurations of those, but others can be added with little effort. Also, switching platform for a website is instantaneous and does not cause any downtime.

Rackspace

The Rackspace Cloud Sites platform allows you to add both Linux and Windows sites, to allow for different technologies such as Apache and MySQL and .NET and MS SQL. For every added site, it is possible to select either platform, or match platforms in different ways.
Control Panel

Atomia (Partly supported)

The Atomia platform includes an intuitive end user control panel that allows customers to configure every aspect of their accounts. The control panel is fully skinnable and extendable which makes it easy to add your own look and feel to it. It does currently not integrate with any third-party help desk service, but this and other functionality can be easily added by you. It should be noted that the Atomia control panel is nothing but a "mere" API client, meaning it can be fully replaced by your own control panel solution to get full flexibility.

Rackspace

Rackspace Cloud Sites include a simple online control panel for managing all aspects of a hosting account, from registering domain names to accessing a live chat with Rackspace helpdesk.

Learn more