Rackspace Cloud Servers versus Amazon EC2: Performance Analysis
Testing amazon and rackspace instances: kernel compile time and "how much it costs to compile kernel on $instance", and IO tests using IOzone -- in short: rackspace is cheaper/better, about 2x on average across the board. Note about "m1.small" i.e. small ec2 instance -- performance sux, and it is actually cheaper to use a more expensive instance, "medium - cpu" or c1.medium.