I'm glad to see SoftLayer getting into this space. However, there are still some things I'd like to know more about.

For example, Amazon's Elastic Block Storage can be snapshotted to S3 (with at least 3 copies in at least two availability zones) very easily. Does CloudLayer's SAN storage offer such ease of backups? I see EVault is offered for about $1/GB which is really expensive compared to Amazon's backups. Can IP addresses be transferred between boxes? What if the boxes are in different data centers? Is the billing only monthly or will it be pro-rated hourly? Can CloudLayer instances be used in conjunction with SoftLayer's hardware load balancing and other services like that which Amazon doesn't offer?

EVault is a backup appliance, it has a software agent running on your server and a dedicated web interface to manage backups. Probably overkill if you just need snapshots.

We use their iSCSI storage space for that, which is about 75c/GB (free server-to-server bandwidth). Their cloud storage appears to be even cheaper 25c/Gb

Higher prices than EC2? I was hoping for something that would make Amazon cut their prices or beef up their RAM offering.

To compare:

    CloudLayer: 1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage - $99.00
    EC2: 1 Core + 1.7GB RAM + 100GB Elastic Block Storage - $82.00

Cloudlayer also includes unlimited inbound bandwidth and 2000GB outbound. The outbound bandwidth alone would set you back $340 with Amazon.

Not just that, but when you look at the higher-end instances, CloudLayer's pricing becomes even more attractive. At $300, you get 8GB of RAM and 8 cores. Considering that Amazon's EBS has I/O usage charges, this is cheaper than Amazon's Large instance (7.5GB RAM and 2 cores with 2 compute units per core) with any I/O usage.

EDIT: SoftLayer is also saying that their base CPU is 2.0GHz rather than the 1.2GHz that Amazon's compute units are based off of.

It amazes me that in these discussions people always make a beeline right to the price, as if it not only matters but is the paramount point of concern.

I'm not exactly in the wily-nilly "VC money has caused me to lose all sense of proportion so I think I'm going to spend $20,000 on a nice big fishtank filled with tropical freaking bats" section of the market, but I look at $17 difference in these options or $8 difference in, e.g., Slicehost vs. Linode and wonder "What conceivable circumstances are there where this both matters and can not be compensated for by eating less pizza and more ramen?"

(Yeah, if you start buying dozens of them, it almost approaches real money every month. Of course, if you're buying dozens of them, you should ideally be running a business on top of them.)

I make a beeline to the prices because the last two startup companies I worked for ran dozens of instances and was running a business on top of them. I've directed tens of thousands of dollars in to EC2, that's why I'm interested.

From a little investigation, it's not really an Amazon EC2 competitor. I'd consider it closer to Slicehost and Linode.

It turns out the instances are only offered on a month-to-month deal, not by-the-hour.

The 'Key Advantages' sidebar lists "Pay As You Go or Monthly Packages". I assumed they haven't yet announced their pay as you go pricing. Did you ask somebody at Softlayer about this?

That's what I originally assumed, so I used their sales chat thing.

Apparently the Pay As You Go only refers to the storage and CDN.

Even though Slicehost quotes monthly rates, in my experience they prorate charges for partial months used down to some unit even smaller than a day, and always spin up instances in a matter of minutes. So even 'month-to-month' pricing might have a de facto pricing/operations that's closer to hourly than monthly.

Yes, Softlayer prorates everything.

What kind of IOPS/transfer speeds are people getting from Cloudlayer or similar "disk clouds"? This storage with its encryption sounds secure, robust but slow. Would one use NFS or some SAN/iSCSI/networked blocked device and put some kind of distributed file system on that?

Or perhaps one needs to plan an architecture where you never block on any disk read, writes being usually buffered?

I'll note that my app probably relies a lot on files for data access rather than throwing everything in an SQL database (and I wonder how Postgres would fare on such a shared disk system)

I'm actually shopping through these different hosting services today, so this is very timely for me. What I'm really liking about CloudLayer is their ability to expand my HD storage capacity (a feature which is important to me as I operate a crawler). Linode and Slicehost don't seem to offer that and, so far, CloudLayer is looking pretty competitive with EC2. Does anyone know of any other services that offer that?

The unlimited incoming bandwidth is great too.

regardless of price and features, any new competition is good for the consumer

Others should learn from this: free/unlimited inbound bandwidth encourages people to upload data into the cloud. Sounds like a nice platform for building crawlers.