Cloud hosting with the Rackspace Cloud
Use caution when moving to Mosso or the Rackspace Cloud. Everything was great at first, but things went downhill quickly. We started having lots of “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request” errors, which relate to their MySQL servers. Please test thoroughly before using for anything important.
***Warning!***
You may have seen the announcement on twitter (if not then shame on you, you should be following us). WebDevNews has moved to new hosting. As Xavisys Web Development (the company that owns/operates this site) has been growing, we’ve been trying to find just the right company to partner with in order to offer high quality hosting to our clients. Rackspace Cloud Hosting is that company. We tried quite a few ranging from Bluehost to Host Gator to Rackspace. We were not looking for cheap hosting, we were looking for the best hosting we could find for our specific needs. While some were better than others, RackSpace Cloud Hosting was the best.
In order to test out the hosting, we moved a couple sites to the Rackspace Cloud. We didn’t want to move any really big complex sites, but didn’t exactly want to test with my wife’s blog either. Instead, we moved both WebDevNews and Attackr. Both are WordPress (database driven) sites, and combined they average about 650 pageviews a day. While it’s not a lot of traffic, we thought it would give us a good idea of how Rackspace Cloud Hosting would perform.
We hit a few snags along the way. The architecture of the Rackspace Cloud caused WP-Super-Cache (a popular WordPress plugin) to fail. Believe it or not, I was pretty happy about that. See, sometimes you go months without any problems on a host and by the time you have a problem you’re already pretty committed to using them (all your sites are there, etc). The truth is, you will eventually have problems, and I wanted to see how they handled it. I contacted them via the live support chat link in my admin section and got a person within seconds (this seems to be pretty average there). A ticket was filed and they went to work on it. I worked with them, testing, allowing them to modify my .htaccess, etc. As it turned out, there were actually a couple problems. The first was a problem with the rewrite rules and the second was a problem with cleaning up the files. Both are now fixed, and the technicians really went above and beyond in order to fix the problem. I even got calls from them with updates!
While the two sites aren’t huge, they aren’t small either. According to the statistics I could host roughly 18 similar sites for the base rate of $100/month before I would need to start paying overages. Considering the network they offer and the quality of their service, that’s an amazing price!
Sounds like it’s all roses right? Well, there are some drawbacks. For one, they don’t offer Java/Tomcat or ColdFusion. I don’t use those, so that didn’t bother me at all (and they do offer Windows or Linux, PHP, ASP, .Net, Perl, Python, etc). However, I use SSH constantly, and they don’t offer that. I’m adjusting. The best things about SSH is that I could use wget to pull files directly to the server and then uncompress them quickly. For now I’m settling for uploading the file via FTP and uncompressing with their admin panel. Now if they could just find a way to let me use wget!
So in the end, why did we choose them? First and foremost is their service. Of all the companies we tried, Rackspace and Rackspace Cloud (previously called Mosso) had the best service by far. With Rackspace a human answers the phone and immediately puts you through to a knowledgeable technician. With the Rackspace Cloud, you get a recording and have to press 1 to get a technician. While I’d rather have a human answer the phone, at least you can get through to a knowledgeable person in seconds.
Second, they have great reliability. I’ve worked with Rackspace for a while now, and I know their data-centers are extremely reliable. Since their cloud offerings use those same data-centers, they get the same great reliability and connectivity.
Additionally, they scale very easily. With Rackspace, you need to scale in chunks, adding a new server each time. With the Rackspace Cloud we can scale smoothly, which is more cost-effective.
Lastly, they offer some nice little extras. For a little extra per customer per month, they will extend their 24×7 support to my clients. We don’t want to be a hosting company, we just want to be able offer reliable hosting to our clients that need it. Additionally, if you aren’t set up to take recurring payments (or maybe you don’t even accept credit card?!?), they will bill your clients and deposit the money into your account.
If you’re looking for high-quality hosting, either for your sites or to offer to your clients, take a look at Rackspace Cloud Hosting. If you enter the code REF-XAVISYS when you sign up, you’ll get a $25 rebate off your first month!
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[...] While I haven’t used DowntownHost’s dedicated or VPS servers, I would consider them if I need to upgrade because in my opinion it is difficult to find good customer service and friendly people you can contact repeatedly for reliable tech support in the web hosting industry. That said, I am looking for cloud hosting solutions currently to offer my clients who need web sites that scale and survive the Digg effect or traffic spikes. For that, we are currently evaluating between Amazon and Mosso. [...]
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[...] at MT, that an explanation wasn’t really going to help me or the hundreds of others including WebDevNews – [...]
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[...] after googling around for “cloud server reliability” and having read the what WebDevNews have posted about their experience with RackSpaceCloud, I’ll need to think twice and do more [...]
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Glad you have everything working! You might try a client like ExpanDrive (Mac) or SftpDrive (Windows) to emulate some of what you do over SSH – I find it to be a HUGE help (Mosso does support SFTP).
Rob La Gesse,
Mosso
I actually run linux, I'll have to see if there's something similar out there. If you know of one, let me know.
What exactly is SFTP?
http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html
Nice! Have you used that on Mosso?
I know this article is focusing on the Mosso Cloud Servers, but here’s a heads up on something for Mosso’s Cloud Files.
I’m sure many of your readers are interested in an easy way to manage their Cloud Files containers and objects .. especially, for those who’d like to have more than one user but don’t want to give out access to their whole admin panel!! There are many options to access Cloud Files by a single user, but we needed a way to create sub accounts, assign containers, etc..
Enter, Cloud9.
*****
Cloud9 is a new web-based service that allows users, or Web Designers/Programmers, to manage their Cloud Files more easily. It’s accessible, secure and fast. Basically, it improves upon the Mosso Cloud Files manager in these ways:
1) Multiple file uploads!! Up to 20 at a time! No more waiting, file after file, or trying to teach our clients how to use Cyberduck / FireUploader, et al. Easy online access from nearly anywhere.
2) You can create unlimited ‘user’ accounts and give them access only to containers that you assign to them. Unlimited Users, Unlimited Containers.
3) You, as the admin, stay in complete control over the users, containers, objects (files), etc. You have global read/write/delete access.
4) Each user can manage their own objects (files), upload/delete, etc. as well as add containers to their user account without taking up your valuable time.
5) It’s super easy for you and your clients to use.
6) Each file name listed in a container is pre-linked to the file, so using the URL for that file is as easy as, Right Click, Copy Link!
So, be sure to check it out.. it’s pre-launch time and everything is getting the file check off for the launch date… Cloud9 will be issuing a limited number of FREE accounts during the beta phase. After which, the service will start a little above that Venti Mocha Frap you had last week, and will offer plans for different usage limits :)
Cloud9 Website
Cloud9 has an official new home.. and is getting prepared for the Public Beta, after successful internal Alpha and Beta testing phases!
Stay tuned..
Deciding whether to use Mosso/Rackspace Cloud services for your site is or not, may be debatable.. BUT, using their CDN Cloud Files service has significant benefits to any site, whether you’re simply serving images or files to your site, or larger audio/video media content.. the Cloud Files CDN Network provides incredibly fast, reliable service. And with Cloud9, you can manage your files quickly and easily.
Stay away from Rackspace and their cloud host if you do anything mission critical you will keep getting No Nodes errors and your conversions rates will suck esp if you are using Joomla or anything database driven and their are almost daily issues with their MySQL service.
I thoroughly agree with you. I need to add a warning to this post. I am migrating over to Layered Tech (actually, this site suffered from those issues and is now Hosted with Layered Technologies
I run an e-commerce site and I switched to mosso/rackspace about 3 months ago from Godaddy because Godaddy was kinda slow. But its been a nightmare ever since. Rackspace/Mosso is the most unreliable server I have ever hosted our site on. I am using their Cloud Server. Constant load issues and errors like “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request.” where the site doesn’t come up at all. Definitely do not use these guys. Their service is good but reliability stinks. I am on the phone with them ever other day for the past 3 months. They do give me a month free once in a while because of all the issues..but this is nothing compared to the amount of revenue I am losing on my site. Stay away from these guys – they are horrible.
Yeah, I had roughly the same experience (give or take)
@deepak,
Why are you hosting an ecommerce site on the Cloud Server platform, you should be running it on Cloud Sites, as the Cloud Servers platform is really for an application dev environment..
@Aaron,.. nice Affiliate link – cheap man, real cheap.
First of all, there are no affiliate links in there. If you want to enter the code to get a discount, feel free. I no longer get anything out of it because I’m no longer with them.
Second, it’s not “cheap” to have affiliate links on a site like this. It has to pay for itself somehow. My time and my costs should be reimbursed.
Ahh.. yes, that would be an affiliate link my friend, whether you’re ‘with them’ or not.. a direct link works just as well, if not better, and doesn’t undermine a posters credibility.
(when if goes to a shareasale.com, one of the largest affiliate networks around, that’s what you call them)
I see what link you’re talking about now. I thought you meant there was one in the article. You meant the Layered Technologies one in my comment. I copied/pasted from the footer of this site (my site) when I did it, and if you think it undermines my credibility then I’m sorry, but nothing will be changing anytime soon.
I personally would like to move this site over to 100% affiliate style income, and get rid of the ads in the sidebar and the Google Ads in the posts.
We’ve moved our newest site from Mosso, and others we own, over to a smallish but seriously customer-centric hosting company named Revive Marketing.
Their servers run under Liquid Webs Tier 4 datacenter roofs, have the best Bandwidth providers and their service is second to none. We’re truly looking forward to launching our new site with them.. and refer everyone we know to them.
check em out: (no, this is NOT an affiliate link!)
http://revivemarketing.org/host.php
I use rackspacecloud.com for hosting as well. To get around the ssh problem with wget I use the php exec() command. Its a big help when transferring big files between servers.
exec(‘wget http://mydomain.com/myfile.mov‘);
TRC simply has a 30second cap on HTTP requests through the load balancer. Where it’s annoying it’s not a brick wall. All you need to do is run your larger scripts via ajax in the session and kick off a heartbeat (do a quick ping with a script that runs every 10-20 seconds) to fulfill the LB’s data request. A Rack support rep told me you could have a script take up to two hours or more as long as the balancer gets some kind of data. It’s not perfect but it’s also there to protect the platform.
Rackspace just called to say I had to move and be out by Mar 15th because there are too many requests. They could not say which website was too much. We are within the limits of the agreement. Strange. I am not given any metrics to know what to adjust, or offload, or anything other than move. They said that about 60 sites are too busy for them. Sure surprised me. The cost of moving is not trivial considering working with FTP.
I have a very large investment in time and effort moving sites to Rackspace.