Need option to suspend servers to save money
With EC2, I can make have a virtual machine that I only turn on when I need it. I only pay for disk space, and don't have to pay operating costs when it's off. EC2 is the only cloud provider with this feature, which is very useful for me.
df
shared this idea
We plan to implement an option to address these suggestions. Thank you all for the valuable feedback,
Charlotte Colbert
Product Manager, Cloud Servers
40 comments
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8riaN
commented
I think this could be really great, not just for Mr. Weichert and my needs, but perhaps even might help Rackspace with load balancing - if somebody really clever can figure out how. My needs, and apparently Michael's are for periodic, high load with nothing in between. My application, and perhaps Michael's does not really care much exactly when it runs, within some broad constraints, so I would be perfectly happy to put the whole create the server, run the thing, mothball the server again process into a queue to happen whenever Rackspace feels like it. I'm thinking the window is maybe 12 hours wide, and definately 6 hours wide. I have no idea if the queue suggestion is practical, but the earkt planning stages of the mothball feature seems like the time to bring it up.
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Michael Weichert
commented
I'm really looking forward to this. I have an app that needs to be executed once a month, and when it runs it demands a lot of resources so I'm forced to have a beefy cloud server instance up and running all the time.
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acgann
commented
So we all know the available pool of IPv4 addresses is getting smaller. For those of us load balancing our machines, we don't necessarily need (or want) a public IP on every machine. We would like to be able to a) strip those public IPs off servicenet-only machines and use them in a pool for stuff we do need b) be able to spin a server with Servicenet only ( maybe an advanced tab or a radio button where the public IP option is the default?). Having said that, if I release all my public IPs back to you, having to pay for them again later if I need them elsewhere would be REALLY annoying. So maybe we have the option of as many free public IPs as we have servers?
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Erick Baum
commented
Jered, why not just image it to Cloud Files and fire it back up when you need it then? Sounds like that's all you need.
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Jered Sutton
commented
I am fine if the suspend works similar to ec2 where you lose the ip address when the instance terminates.
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Alex
commented
DHCP with a fresh IP would be just fine for our purposes, so long as a Dynamic DNS type system could be associated with it, where the servers were given a sticky name so they could be reliably found. Something like MachineID.customerID.dynamic.rackspacecloud.net would make that a much more acceptable solution.
Of course for things like web servers behind a dynamic load balancer, fixed IPs are a must. So, I would split the service and offer two suspends: one with fixed IP that includes a fee so long as it is held; one which doesn't and just gives you a sticky DNS name or other way to reliably find the server post reboot.
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Dwayne
commented
Having the IP be stable/same is the point of the request from my perspective.
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Joel Hough
commented
I also would like the option to keep an IP and would not mind paying a small fee if I wanted to keep it in hibernation more than a few weeks. There are also cases where I would have no use for a static IP.
+1 on the elastic IP idea. Being able to assign IPs from my pool to whichever machine I choose seems the best of both worlds. -
Erick Baum
commented
Having IP's as separate resources that can be purchased and assigned to servers as needed would be the best option. But being able to keep an IP with a dormant server is a must. Otherwise, you could just image it and keep it in CloudFiles as 8rian pointed out. Either way, paying to keep an IP seems like a perfectly acceptable option.
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Anonymous
commented
I agree with most of these suggestions. IP needs to be retained for it to be a useful feature. As long as the price was fairly low I'd be willing to pay a maintenance fee to retain the IP address of a suspended server. A good model would be for the IP to be retained for free for 1 month of hibernation, after which a fee would be charged each month or week.
Christopher Amatulli's suggestion of divorcing IPs from servers and making them separate resources with their own fee structure isn't a bad one, although it can't lead to an increase in the overall cost of hosting using the existing model.
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mvmdata
commented
No same ip is not necessary, if a server is suspended for a few weeks or months a couple extra hours for dns to propagate an ip change is no big deal.
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Francisco Reyes
commented
Agree on having an option to keep IP for a fee or having the IP be freed.
Not sure how others are planning to use this, but I figure it likely will be a short time suspension.. since anything long term could be done by creating an image and just creating a VM off the image.
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Dolph
commented
I'm in favor of an optional maintenance fee to retain the IP address, which I can opt out of at any time while the server is in 'hibernation.'
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Cory
commented
I'm almost never going to need the IP to be stable. This is for cases where I did prep work on a project server, and the project was put on hold indefinitely.
A hold like this might last a few months, maybe up to a year, but not years, plural.
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El Jeffo
commented
I'm okay with paying for IP by the month if I value it that much. Otherwise for some cases, I'd just let the IP go.
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Christopher Amatulli
commented
I would say rackspace should change how they charge... make an IP a resource... you can keep the IP for as long as you like, move it between servers if you like... and simply put, each IP is $ per month.. that way we could hold on to an IP for as long as we pay for the resource...
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petedoyle
commented
For most of my uses, I could work around the IP changing with dynamic dns updates.
EC2 has Elastic IPs which are a nice option. Without an elastic IP, the IP changes each time you boot the instance up. With an elastic IP, the instance will always have the same IP. Elastic IPs are free while the instance is running, but are charged at $0.01/hr when the instance is off (~$7/mo!). You can keep the IP indefinitely, as long as you pay for it. Its a nice option.
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Anthony Aldridge commented
I would like to have the option to save the IP or change it. For non-production images I wouldn't have a need to save the IP. Charge a monthly fee to keep the image stored + with or without IP would be nice.
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Nick Jackson commented
A suspended server without an IP address may as well just be kept as a disk image and recreated again in future - keeping an IP would be fairly essential for any suspension mode.
I personally wouldn't mind paying a 'maintenance' rate for a suspended server on top of the image costs if it included things like keeping the IP address.
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Alex Davison
commented
Yes and no. In several cases it wouldn't be an issue for me if the IP address changed. However, in some cases it would be handy to keep the same IP address. Perhaps it could be an option with an associated cost if we wanted to hold an IP address?
