Including Everything Blog

Archive for the ‘Web & Application Hosting’ Category

Rackspace has been building and supporting Microsoft solutions for years. Now, The Rackspace Cloud is marrying the power of our on demand Cloud Servers offering with our expertise in Windows hosting by bringing enterprise-class Windows to the cloud. Launching early in 2010, the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta will be released specifically so we can gather early feedback from users and have it drive development of features. We have made it a priority to deliver the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta the way it is meant to be delivered- 100 percent customer driven.

If you want to be one of the first to get your hands on the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta, sign up at http://rackspacecloud.com/beta.

Microsoft Backed: Cloud Servers for Windows is based on a Microsoft-supported hypervisor that is part of the Server Virtualization Validation Program.

This means that:

• Customers can benefit from the support provided by Microsoft as part of the regular Windows Server technical support framework
• Customers can benefit from the support provided by Microsoft for subsequent service packs
• Customers will enjoy faster time-to-market releases of Windows versions on The Rackspace Cloud

Sign up for the upcoming Cloud Servers for Windows Beta >> http://www.rackspacecloud.com/beta

Anyone that signs up will also get updates on our progress as we move towards our public beta launch in early 2010. Get yourself on the list today!

About The Rackspace Cloud
The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®. Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers™, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing and is ranked #43 on FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for in the United States for 2009. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support ® in delivering their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Rackspace announced on their blog today that they’re sending out free t-shirts to those that link to them using the below information. Give it a shot to receive a free t-shirt from the world’s leading cloud services provider.

Link and get your t-shirt now: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/tshirt

Here is a cool customer, Michael Fidler, in his Rackspace Cloud T-shirt!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rackspacecloud/3965141868/

About The Rackspace Cloud
The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®. Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers™, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing and is ranked #43 on FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for in the United States for 2009. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support ® in delivering their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

With the various TLDs (top level domains) available today, there’s hardly a shortage of domain names available to consumers and businesses. Or is there?

The .com TLD is has always been the king of domain name extensions. The first search we often check to see if our wanted domain name is available is the .com, then likely .net, .org, .info and anything else (probably in that order).

With that, is there any reasonable expectation that we might consider reviving the .com TLD by opening it up to accepting characters other than A-Z and numbers? Introducing symbols into the domain structure would completely open the various extensions for availability again.

We already have clever domains attempting to push the limit of XXX.com

• del.icio.us
• bubbl.us

But imagine if we could take it a step further and do this:

www.p0dca$t.com

I can’t wait for this functionality, and it may actually never come. Does anyone else share the same desires for this as I do?

Few companies take the time to monitor and review their reputation online and actually respond to the complaints and praises their consumers put out there. They responded within 48 hours of the posting online and handled it beautifully.

I rip on Rackspace specifically because I genuinely care for the brand. If I didn’t care, I would leave and find another vendor. I can think of few companies better-poised to take on the challenge of cloud computing better than Rackspace.

In fact, maybe this is where the disconnect is for consumers right now. Not just with Rackspace, but with all vendors claiming to operate their business on cloud architecture. We call it many things, but the common term is “cloud computing”. Are the public’s assumptions in flawless uptime incorrect in that it’s a “distributed processing” model instead.

Cloud technology has already proven itself as a good model for handling larger scale processing for people that need it. Companies like Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) and Rackspace’s new Cloud Servers platform based on Slicehost’s backend are perfect for this need and you can scale up as needed within minutes. This was only a dream a couple of years ago.

That said, is the public incorrect in equating services like Cloud Sites to Rackspace’s multi-rack load balancing solutions? Such a solution still has a point of failure, although small. The chances of an outage under such a system with two high end servers, each in separate racks with a load balancer in place are incredibly low, in fact, near non-existent. We haven’t seen stability like that on any level with Mosso, Amazon S3 or Media Temple the best of my recollection.

Working on an application today, I noticed errors posting to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system was spitting back read-only errors. Upon investigation, I noticed it was their service that had the issue and not my application.

The status page Rackspace has put up for Cloud Files has up confirms there’s an issue with the service today. I contacted support and they confirmed that “the backend is experiencing no problems” and that “this was simply an unanticipated load on the system so we’re adding more hardware to handle the increased traffic”.

My thoughts are consistent with my other posts. The entire point of “cloud” is that your data’s receiving the highest level of uptime possible out there. This hasn’t been proven yet. I’m shocked that the response was that of “we didn’t know about the load we would receive”. This service’s sole existence is so that your data can be under heavy load. That’s why we choose a cloud service over a single point of failure.

Instead, Rackspace has in effect created their own single point of failure. They took a service out of  “beta” prior to scaling their systems up to speed to handle “live” traffic. With the media attention they’ve been attempting to drum up against competitor Amazon (AMZN), a wise business owner would be ready to handle a surge of usage traffic upon the successful launch of a competing product.  You don’t launch a system, and then say: “Whoops. We  got our  competition’s business. Time to scale up”. By then you’re positioned to lose those new clients back to your competitor again.

I’ve said it before. I’m a huge fan of Rackspace as a brand, their technical support ideals and values, etc. But these types of performance issues are amaturish for a company of their age and place in this world. They’re a tech leader in their space and better than this.

Their speeds may be twice that of Amazon S3, but I think Amazon has a more stable service. All of the big ones have been hit at one time or another, that’s not the complaint. I have been using Rackspace’s Cloud Sites service for 6+ months and it’s had many issues with their supposedly stable cloud. Every time I think a vendor has nailed it, something like this goes and happens to have me questioning “cloud” and what it means again.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ve made it yet. At best my data is safe. But uptime isn’t something I’d bet my life savings on if you’re shopping for it on Cloud. It’s overpriced data storage and has never proven itself to be as “stable” as any of my cPanel linux builds to this day.

Am I the only one out there that feels this way? I’m not mad. I’m disappointed.