Rackspace Reduces Cloud Files Storage Price by 33% (opens in new tab)

Duplicity is a simple tool for signed/encrypted (PGP) differential backups using a variety of protocols including: ssh/scp, local file access, rsync, ftp, HSI, WebDAV, Tahoe-LAFS, and Amazon S3. I'm assuming that rackspace storage supports at least one of these?

There is a very easy to use command line interace, and also a GUI (which I have not tried).

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Should Arq use Rackspace (I'm the author of Arq)? So far it's only been using S3 because that has always seemed to me to be the best option.

There's always JungleDisk: https://www.jungledisk.com/

One theory is that cloud hosting providers use memory as a metric to estimate a customer's use of resources that aren't directly paid for (bandwidth, CPU, support, etc). So even though you may be way overpaying for increased memory based on current RAM prices, their data may show that you're much more likely to also use more resources you aren't directly paying for and set the price accordingly.

Well you probably know its not really just the RAM you are paying, they just use the RAM amount as a label. If you take a large chunk of RAM, that significantly reduces the number of other users that can go on that machine. Really its the whole service is expensive when you want larger amounts of RAM.

Basically I think we are paying for all of their support people and infrastructure and also a healthy profit.

RAM is a resource that they can't oversubscribe, so it costs more.

If I have an instance with 8x CPU cores they can timeshare CPU time between multiple customers on that physical server, since it's unlikely that all instances will use 100% CPU 100% of the time.

However, if I have a server running memcached and a 30GB cache, they can't also cell that RAM to another customer. This limits the amount they can oversell server resources, thus they charge more for it.

You, me, and every single one of their customers. Who doesn't want lower prices? I wish they had a 128MB option!

Even S3 outgoing price are ridiculously expensive for any kind of significant bandwidth use, that's what CDN are for (and in that area, cloudfront is really not cheap either). I'm a fan of AWS and use a lot of their services, but their bandwith price from them to the outside world are far from the best deal (of course if your bandwith is still calculated in the hundreds of dollars this doesn't apply/matter much).

I know you weren't saying the contrary, but still I wanted to point it out.

S3 has had object versioning since forever (okay, since 2010, but that's eons in the web world) The original announcement is here: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/02/amazon-s3-enhancement-ver...

I haven't looked at the RS versioning offering, but I can't imagine it being any different in terms of features of the amazon one.

They dropped their prices in February: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/amazon-s3-price-reduction...

Amazon Web Services S3 is still cheaper than Rackspace Cloud so I would still stick with Amazon.