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!

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Cloud hosting with the Rackspace Cloud