GoGrid

GoGrid refers to itself as the "world's first multi-server control panel." GoGrid's offerings aren't functionally different from Amazon's EC2, but using the old term "control panel" seems to be a better description of what's going on than the trendier term "cloud." You start up and shut down load balancers in much the same way as relatively ancient tools like Plesk and cPanel let you add and subtract services.

While GoGrid offers many of the same services as Amazon's EC2, the Web-based control panel is much easier to use than the EC2 command line. You point and click. There's no need to cut and paste information because little pop-up boxes show the way, by suggesting available IP addresses, for example. The system is intuitive, and it takes only a few minutes to build up your network. A simple ledger on the left keeps track of the costs and helps you manage the budget.

GoGrid also has a wider variety of OS images ready to go. There is the usual collection of CentOS/Fedora and common LAMP stacks. If you need Windows, you can have Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0, and Microsoft SQL Server is available at extra cost. There are also images with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and the Facebook application server. These make it a bit easier to start up.

While GoGrid offers many of the same features as Amazon's EC2, it doesn't provide more cloudlike services for storing information in a shared way like SimpleDB. This can make it a bit harder to start up and shut down servers without a bit of grief. The startup notes for the service point out that the only way to stop paying for a server is to delete it, and that means losing all of the data on it.

There's no simple way to build custom images at this moment, but the documentation says GoGrid is working on a way to turn any running server into an image that can be restarted later. If you're going to be expanding and contracting your network as the traffic ebbs and flows, you'll have to come up with some tools of your own to add and subtract these servers. (See the QuickTime video.)