AWS offers Elastic IP Addresses, which are great for switching website domains to a new instance/stack without having to wait for DNS changes to propagate.
Some cloud service providers (e.g., Rackspace) do not offer such reassigning to their public IP addresses. In Rackspace's case, one of their Load Balancers would accomplish what I want, but the cost (starts at $38/month if need SSL) becomes much greater than AWS's Elastic IP addresses (free if assigned to a box or ~$8/month if not used).
Is there a way to reproduce the convenience of AWS's Elastic IP addresses when hosting on Rackspace without using a load balancer (e.g., via some particular server setup or use of a 3rd party)?
As far as I know, Elastic addresses are just the interface Amazon provides to its user-controllable load balancers. You are still going to need some load balancer or proxy in the chain in order to replicate this function. I did some Googling just now but am sorry to say I didn't turn up any free load-balancers apart from Amazon.