Preface: I am aware that there are other questions closed asking the same basic thing; however, I cannot locate the actual answer or anything in the FAQ that tells me I cannot ask this here. I could find, however, the following: "If your question generally covers the operation of websites which you control, then you’re in the right place to ask your question!" Additionally, AWS and Rackspace recently changed their pricing structures, so comparisons even a year old are basically useless.
I would like to know the webmaster-perspectives on major cloud providers, including AWS, Rackspace, Azure, and so on. Please include things like whether storage is persistent across reboots (like AWS is not and Rackspace is), data reliability (99.9% across all of them may be advertised, but have you had any negative experiences with anyone in particular), access to other tools (like AWS having SQS) and so on.
Additionally, how the heck can I compare actual server speed per dollar on providers if they advertise "1 vCPU" or 1GB RAM? How fast is the CPU, is the RAM DDR2, DDR3, or DDR4, and what speeds? 1366 MHZ? 1600 MHZ?
That kind of stuff. I am currently with Rackspace and AWS, but with the introduction of reserved instances (much less utilization levels), it's hard to compare.
Please answer in a community-benefitial way, with not just "AWS is better" but "I find AWS is better than Rackspace because I like being able to reboot the server and have the image refresh." Alternatively, a 1CPU / 1GB / 20GB box is 30% cheaper in AWS with reserved instances but Rackspace performs better because the storage is local rather than NAT with AWS".
