AppHarbor vs Rackspace Cloud Servers: What are the differences?
What is AppHarbor? Instantly deploy and scale .NET applications. AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET Platform as a Service. AppHarbor can deploy and scale any standard .NET application to the cloud.
What is Rackspace Cloud Servers? Powerful Linux and Windows servers in minutes. Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.
AppHarbor and Rackspace Cloud Servers are primarily classified as "Platform as a Service" and "Cloud Hosting" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by AppHarbor are:
- You push .NET and Windows code to AppHarbor using Git, Mercurial, Subversion or Team Foundation Server with the complimentary Git service or through integrations offered in collaboration with Bitbucket, CodePlex and GitHub.
- When AppHarbor receives your code it will be built by a build server. If the code compiles all unit tests contained in the compiled assemblies will be run. The result and progress of the build and unit test status can be monitored on the application dashboard. AppHarbor will call any service hooks that you add to notify you of the build result.
- If everything checks out the application is deployed and configured on AppHarbor application servers. AppHarbor can scale an application vertically and horizontally within seconds for better request throughout, performance and failover. AppHarbor balance load across all instances running that application. Scaling an application gives higher request thoughput, redundancy in case of instance failure and better performance.
On the other hand, Rackspace Cloud Servers provides the following key features:
- 100% power and network uptime guarantee
- Cloud choice- We run the world’s largest open cloud, giving you flexibility, choice, and no vendor lock-in. That means your workloads are portable. Host them with any open cloud vendor—or even in your own data center.
- Technical expertise- We employ more Red Hat® Certified Engineers than any other hosting company. And over 100 Rackspace employees have earned the title of Microsoft® Certified Professional.
"Has a totally free account option" is the primary reason why developers consider AppHarbor over the competitors, whereas "Quick and reliable cloud servers" was stated as the key factor in picking Rackspace Cloud Servers.