Friday, February 22, 2013

Rackspace Drops Cloud Pricing In Response To Amazon

Rackspace Hosting, the San Antonio-based cloud computing and hosting company, announced this morning that it is dropping pricing on its open cloud bandwidth services, by 33 percent. The firm said that the pricing changes are for its cloud bandwidth and content delivery network (CDN) services, and also included a move to tiered pricing for Cloud Files, its object storage service, and other products. The pricing is particularly beneficial for Rackspace customers using it for content delivery network (CDN) bandwidth.

The pricing changes are a direct response to Amazon.com, which has been pushing into the CDN market with its Amazon CloudFront service. The new prices at Rackspace lower the price of CDN bandwidth from $0.18 to $0.12 per GB; that price matches the pricing at Amazon CloudFront, which lowered its pricing to $0.12 per GB for its lowest tier on February 1st.

Amazon and Rackspace are fighting on multiple fronts to gain market share in the cloud computing market; Rackspace has been looking to unseat the dominance of Amazon Web Services via its support and significant contributions to OpenCloud, and the two also compete on multiple fronts in the hosting, CDN, cloud storage, and other cloud services areas.

---