Cloud Hosting HQ

According to this article, Rackspace has finally broken the one-hundred thousand customer mark. Congratulations to them and their continued success in the cloud hosting industry.

Rackspace Hosting ended the first quarter with 99,446 customers, meaning the company has by now easily cleared the 100,000 customer mark. More than 80 percent of those customers are using Rackspace’s cloud computing services, a clear sign of the evolution of the company’s business beyond its roots in managed hosting.

Hostingpublicity.com takes a look at a new app Rackspace has released for the iPad:

The Rackspace(R) Cloud, the cloud computing division of Rackspace Hosting, has announced the release of Rackspace Cloud Pro(TM), the first application for the new iPad(TM) to enable developers to monitor and manage their Rackspace Cloud Servers(TM). With Cloud Pro, users can turn on backups for a server, create new servers from backups, manage back-up scheduling, re-boot, rename, resize and delete servers — all using the iPad’s intuitive touchscreen interface. The free application is now available at iTunes.

The application also offers a panel on the login screen that shows users the current system status of the entire Rackspace Cloud and displays the US and UK Rackspace support numbers. Using Cloud Pro, users can also ping the public IP address for a Cloud Server to see how responsive their server is from wherever they are located. Cloud Pro for iPad frees businesses and developers from their desktops by offering them enterprise-quality server control and functionality through the convenience and mobility of the iPad.

As found on wiredweb.com:

Rackspace, the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry has announced that it has been voted as the overall 30th best place to work in the UK and once again the highest ranking IT Services company, in the prestigious Sunday Times 100 Best Companies Awards.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace, had this to say:

“We are very proud of all the progress we have made in our business over the last year and what is truly pleasing is that as the company has grown our ‘Rackers’ continue to feel valued in their roles.”

Congratulations to Rackspace for winning this award!

Snipe.net has written an open letter to Rackspace about their recent WordPress hack issues:

Too little, too late. I could have (and did) tell you all of this already.

And unfortunately, running the most recent version of WordPress doesn’t help. This week, I have personally had to repair 11 WordPress websites hosted on the RS Cloud that were hacked, all were running 2.9.1 and had very few plugins in common. The plugins they do have in common, like WP-Supercache, are plugins Rackspace suggests to keep the CPU-cycle raping down to a minimum. And WP-Supercache is a mature plugin that is very well supported so it seems unlikely (although certainly not impossible) that it is the vector.

And thanks to your logfiles not being able to be viewed in real time (as they are owned by root), this leaves web developers that actually have a clue very few options for forensically backtracking the vector.

He has more to say, but it sounds like Rackspace Cloud Sites & WordPress may not be a safe combination right now. I hope they can get this cleared up ASAP.

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.