web analytics

Stephen Pickering

Tag: Rackspace Cloud Sites

  • The Difference Between Rackspace Cloud Sites and Cloud Servers

    This has been on my mind for some time, as I am a customer and reseller of Cloud Sites. I think the simple explanation is like how Steve Jobs explained the difference between Desktops and tablets: “Trucks vs. Cars.”

    Cloud Sites, while being very powerful and very scalable, are more for serving content. This blog post you are reading is being served by Cloud Sites, running WordPress. WordPress and other “CMSs” (Content Management Systems) are perfect for Cloud Sites, being astonishingly easy to use, while being powerful enough to handle all the traffic you can send to it, without crashing.

    Cloud Servers is more for websites that are designed as services. While being perfectly capable of running WordPress and content, for that type of application, Cloud Servers may be overkill, as well as being more technically difficult to set up and maintain (One of the many benefits of Cloud Sites is that all of the technical stuff is actively maintained and managed 100% for you). A services type website (Think Twitter, Facebook, an Online Photo Editor) is a destination people go to do some type of application in the “Cloud” as it were as opposed to running it on their own computer. Yes, I know, Twitter and Facebook are places where you consume content, but they are also services where you create content (in these cases to share). So simply put, “Services” websites are like computers in the Cloud, where a lot of computation power is needed to provide a computational “service” and then output into and from the Cloud.

    So if you have a website designed to inform or display content, go Cloud Sites. If you are planning a computational intensive website, that’s designed to be more of a service to your visitors, Cloud Servers is probably your best bet.

    ————————————————————–

    Since this blog post was originally written and published on RackspaceReseller.com/blog which was a domain I originally ran, but had to take down, I made a photo copy of the one comment that was originally on it before I moved the post over here. Here the photo of the comment:

    dberoffcomment122912

  • Rackspace Cloud Sites Advantages: Pages that Load in under 2 Seconds

    pingdom load testAnd as you can see from the photo to the right, you sometimes even get Millisecond loads! And keep in mind that is all the way from Amsterdam to Dallas/Ft. Worth.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t mention CloudFlare here too. I use CloudFlare connected to my Cloud Sites account. And they are at least partially if not the majority reason one gets such fast load times. They do a lot of things to optimize every aspect of your site as well as protecting it from botnets, scrapers, hackers, and email harvesters.

    Oh, and did I mention CloudFlare is free? I mean they do have a paid version, but the free version, which I’m using, gives you all these advantages I’m talking about. Never has a company built up such good will in my brain. I’ll probably end up paying for the “Pro” version just because of the amount of “Goodwill” they’ve built up in my brain.

    This company should be one of Seth Godin’s “Case Studies.”

    Anyway, the advantage of Cloud Sites is simply that you get the best in managed hosting, best equipment, facilities, data center, Cloud Technologies, 24×7 fanatical maintenance. The “best in class” nature of the facilities combined with Cloud Technology, allows for two additional things: Superior Uptime and the ability to handle all the traffic that can be thrown at it.

    Now you can step up to a dedicated server, or even a Cloud Server, but the performance you get with Cloud Sites + CloudFlare for the price and the level of management, I believe, is unmatched.

    To me, Cloud Sites is like the Apple of hosting. You know you’re getting the ‘best’ but it’s also easy to use. You feel safe, and you don’t feel like you have to be a geek to use it. Although if you are a geek, and there’s nothing wrong with that (I’m at least part geek), it’s still a lot of fun to work with.

  • The Most Concise Description of Cloud Computing on the Net

    On my Twitter feed today I saw that a post by Chad Keck, an engineer at Rackspace, (@ckeck on Twitter) titled “What is Cloud Computing” with a link to a post on the Rackspacecloud site that has a great, relatively short explanation of what cloud computing is along with a nice visual. Since I’m re-selling smaller portions of the Rackspace Cloud Site $100 offering for folks interested in its benefits at prices close to that of shared hosting packages (See Here for details), I thought I’d reprint it.

    What is Cloud Computing?

    We define cloud computing in simplest terms, as follows: A set of pooled computing resources, delivered over the web, powered by software. Cloud computing – not to be confused with grid computing, utility computing, or autonomic computing – is a form of computing that involves the interaction of several virtualized resources, meaning that many servers are connecting and sharing information that can expand and contract across servers depending on the amount of servers needed to manage the amount of traffic on various sites. Cloud computing is often provided “as a service” over the internet, typically in the form of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS). The “cloud” in “cloud computing” stems from the interconnectivity of the computers and computer networks that form the internet because, when these relationships are diagramed, the resulting image looks like a cloud.

    One of the major benefits of cloud computing is that cloud customers do not have to raise the capital to purchase, manage, maintain, and scale the physical infrastructure required to handle drastic traffic fluctuations. Instead of having to invest this time and money to keep their sites afloat, which would put them in the position of often having to own, manage, maintain and scale far many more servers than they needed on a regular day, cloud computing customers simply pay for the resources they use as they need them. This particular characteristic of cloud computing allows traffic to increase dramatically as site developers no longer have to manage and predict traffic, but can promote their sites endlessly, knowing that their sites will stay afloat no matter the traffic influx. Furthermore, costs are improved by the cloud computing model which maximizes server usage since cloud computing customers do not have to engineer for peak load limits.

    Have questions? Feel free to ring us at 1-877-934-0409, ping us on Live Chat, or just scope us out on Twitter. We are here 24/7/365, and we love to talk cloud. Check out our Cloud Hosting and Cloud Computing products. (*This is to Rackspace itself, if you interested in their full $100 Cloud Site)

    *If your interested in being on a smaller chunk of a Rackspace Cloud Site, feel free to ring me, Stephen Pickering, at 1-501-291-1375, email me at [email protected], or scope me out on Twitter too, I’d love to talk . See Here for details of my plans.

    Courtesy of: Chad Keck and Rackspacecloud.com -
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/what_is_cloud_computing