Google Compute Engine vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Compute Engine
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.
$0
per month GB
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.1 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
Preemptible Price - Predefined Memory
0.000892 / GB
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.001907 / GB
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.002669 / GB
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined Memory
$0.004237 / GB
Hour
Preemptible Price - Predefined vCPUs
0.006655 / vCPU
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.014225 / CPU
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.019915 / vCPU
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.031611 / vCPU
Hour
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPrices vary according to region (i.e US central, east, & west time zones). Google Compute Engine also offers a discounted rate for a 1 & 3 year commitment.—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Considered Both Products
Google Compute Engine
Chose Google Compute Engine
I've used Rackspace, AWS, and Digital Ocean to host virtual environments. In my opinion, GCE has a robust feature set on par with any other mainstream virtual hosting company. I would say AWS and Digital Ocean are comparable, and Rackspace would be slightly less robust than …
Rackspace Managed Hosting

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Google Compute Engine
6.6
44 Ratings
21% below category average
Rackspace Managed Hosting
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.126 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling8.241 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.737 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates5.242 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools3.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images5.643 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support6.944 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls7.044 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation7.92 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Cloudways
Cloudways
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
7.3
(44 ratings)
1.1
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(1 ratings)
2.2
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(9 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
8.4
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(10 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Compute EngineRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
Google Compute Engine is so easy to implement and run. It doesn't require much knowledge to build an app since they provide multiple options to choose from with their prebuilt sample list. We can easily make customization on any website app we built for our client according to their needs and make changes if required.
Read full review
Rackspace
Rackspace is very well suited as a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, particularly when you're planning on leaving the infrastructure up for a period of time. They seem to focus a bit more on that aspect of infrastructure. That is to say, they seem to promote running servers for longer periods of time and not spinning up/shutting down servers frequently based on usage spikes. While, they do support that sort of availability -- they don't have features built into their offering, necessarily, that make it a lot easier to implement. Our experiences with Rackspace have been 100% around their cloud platform, but they have another entire part of their business that is centered around hosting/maintaining/supporting physical hardware (bare metal). They have had a great reputation over the last several years (10+) for being top-notch providers in this space, which is one reason we even considered them for our Cloud-based hosting needs. We don't have any direct experience with their "bare metal" offerings, but their reputation is certainly great, and worth noting.
Read full review
Pros
Google
  • Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
  • Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
  • Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs
Read full review
Rackspace
  • Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
  • Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
Read full review
Cons
Google
  • Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
  • Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
  • Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.
Read full review
Rackspace
  • Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned.
  • Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers
  • In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace.
  • In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Google
Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.
Read full review
Rackspace
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
Read full review
Usability
Google
Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.
Read full review
Rackspace
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Google
GCE is highly available system. So far we have not experienced any planned or unplanned outages. We do experience application errors however they are not GCE reated. GCE provides us with wide ranges of option to make systems highly available like block storage, global load balancing, GPU accelerators and Machine Managers which manages different VMs.
Read full review
Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Performance
Google
It's good in terms of Performance, as compared to other VMs or Compute Engine Services by other providers. Google Compute Engine integrates seamlessly with other Google Cloud Platform services, allowing users to leverage a wide range of tools and services without significant performance degradation.
Read full review
Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Google
  • The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
  • Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.
Read full review
Rackspace
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Google
Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.
Read full review
Rackspace
LiquidWeb or Amazon both offer some products that could be considered similar. I will say though, after years of dealing with Rackspace, their service is what always has me coming back. Their support is typically so much better than other vendors that I hesitate to use other vendors. Pricing might be cheaper, but when you have an issue and need it resolved ASAP, then Rackspace has come through in the majority of cases for me.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Google
  • With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
  • As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.
Read full review
Rackspace
  • We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
  • We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
  • A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Google Compute Engine Screenshots

Screenshot of How to choose the right VM
With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?Screenshot of documentation, guides, and reference architectures
Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform with features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios.