Cloud Hosting HQ

The Rackspace Cloud blog has 6 tips for hosting WordPress on their Cloud Sites service:

1. Have An AUTOMATIC WordPress Backup Strategy
2. Copy/Paste Inside The File Manager For Faster Setup
3. Allow WordPress to Update Itself With More Memory
4. Allow WordPress To Upload Large Images & Files
5. Get Unique IPs For Your Websites By Adding SSL
6. Increase Speed & Cut Compute Cycles With WP SuperCache

If you use or are considering using Cloud Sites, be sure to read the whole thing.

VPS.NET will be performing “emergency maintenance” early Thursday morning for their Chicago VPS:

Our technical engineers have detected a fault within this SAN that will require replacing some of it’s components, your VPS is not affected at the moment and continues to run as normal.

Unfortunately we must turn off all the VPS running on this SAN to perform the maintenance, this job will occur on Thursday, 14th of January @ 01:00 AM EST.

We expect the affected VPS to be down for a period of approximately 90 minutes.

We apologise for the inconvenience this might cause.

I’m used to that kind of downtime for a shared host, but it’s a surprising amount of downtime for a company that says “Our VPS cloud architecture is designed from the ground up with redundancy at its core.” However, I do appreciate the warning — often you only hear about these things after they happen.

I still recommend them, but that downtime is disappointing. Hopefully they can make a system that has a redundant SAN.

Jack of All Clouds wonders if 2010 will be the year of the cloud. I think growth rates will start growing exponentially soon — and my guess is it starts this year.

Most of the groundwork is laid. Cloud hosting has become much easier thanks to companies like VPS.NET and Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso). I expect we’ll see some new companies doing great things and keep things competitive.

Two main areas that need addressing are: (1) ease of use and (2) reliability.

For instance, Amazon EC2 is very reliable but is not easy enough for most people. Rackspace Cloudsites is easy to use but does not offer SSH access — and I’ve heard people grumbling about it’s lack of reliability. Rackspace Cloudservers is reliable but not easy. And so on and so forth. I think VPS.NET is bridging the gap between reliability & easy of use, and there are sure to be many similar companies coming soon.

Here’s a chart from JoAC showing the top 500k sites by cloud provider:

Where do you think the state of cloud hosting will be in a year from now?

Here’s a great video explaining cloud hosting:

Refreshingly Blue has a post where they describe their experience with Rackspace Sites and then later with VPS.NET. Their advice? “Stay away from Rackspace Cloudsites“:

Unfortunately, it turns out the Rackspace Cloudsites is unstable, unreliable, and slow. The support is still good, at least in terms of being available, but all they can say is “I’m sorry all your sites are down.” [...]

The stability of  Rackspace Cloudsites is terrible. Just this week the control panel was completely offline for about 3 hours. It went off line right as I was transferring a site and consequently I was unable to complete the transfer and had to start all over again the next day. [...]

Even worse than having the control panel offline, we run several e-commerce sites and 2 weeks before Christmas, our peak sales time of the year, our database was in “read only mode” ALL DAY due to a “degradation” in their service.

So they switched to VPS.NET. Their performance doubled, reliability increased, and it was half the price!

It seems like everyone is talking about the wonder of cloud hosting. So what is it?

Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting that enables your website to scale without replacing or upgrading hardware. It lets you focus on making your website great, instead of  how to keep it running.

This can happen because of “the cloud” — multiple servers linked together to form one platform. Because there are many servers instead of one, it balances the load, increases capacity, and eliminates a single point of failure.

That is, if a server’s hard drive fails, your site is unaffected, because your data is mirrored on other servers.

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