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[jpminus]

I really like the whole idea behind the Rackspace Cloud Sites but at $149 (+$20 for SSL which I'll need) I can spend just a little more and get a dedicated server or even look at colocating my own server (which I already have so there's very little up front cost for me). I currently host about 50 sites spread across three different VPS's and would like to #1) Manage all from one spot and #2) not worry about managing and balancing my sites between the servers.

So..here's a few questions..
1) Are they still battling the "Node Not Available" issues?
2) Can you give any examples of your CPU Cycles? That part makes me REALLY nervous...I'd like to see some real world usage examples.
3) Have the added any ability to unzip a file on the server? FTPing CMS's and CMS and updates takes forever and can be unreliable.
4) Do you feel you made the right choice?

Edit: Most of the reviews I've Googled are older..if you have any links to fresh reviews please post as well.

[CloudWeb]

Another alternative is a high-end Reseller plan on a Cloud provider. If you do Dedicated or Co-Location you're going to get into the management levels (more costs), and, you're going to lose the benefits of Cloud (redundancy, high availability, scalability, ease of use/management, etc).

Rackspace calculates cpu cycles by CPU processing time and disk IO. So higher DB accesses, and performing backups will be more IO intensive while not necessarily consuming much CPU time. Their control panel does show you your levels. Why are you so concerned about this? Are you nearing going over your limits? I believe they still define the 10K cpu cycles as "a 2.8GHz modern CPU". So it sounds like they expect you to use approximately 1 core worth of CPU. Now what a "modern CPU" is.. who knows what they consider that. I consider a modern CPU a Nehalem which is going to be significantly faster than a Clovertown, or even a Harpertown Xeon but that's getting into some deeper levels that they may not want to go or even be able to answer.

[Mark Muyskens]

Yes, you are still unable to unzip. You can take a few minutes and hop on there live chat though and get it taken care of for you though.

[jpminus]

Originally Posted by CloudWeb

Why are you so concerned about this? Are you nearing going over your limits?

I'm trying to measure the overall value here. It's a non-standard way to measure something and due to the cost it's an all-or-none decision for me.

The 'node not available' errors seem to by mysql related that I've read reports of people solving by using Cloud Servers as their databases server so now I'm looking at $149+$20 (ssl)+ $50/month for a 512-1gb Cloud Server.

The bottom line here is that I'd like to put 100 domains in one spot and not worry about running top commands from console and checking RAM twice a day. If I put them all on one dedicated or even cloud VPS I feel like I've got all my eggs in one basket and that makes me nervous.

I guess in the end..even if I added a cloud server database server to complement the cloud sites I'm ~$200 a month but I'm trying to find people actually using cloud servers that are happy with it.

[dazmanultra]

It really depends on your SQL usage, but what is the latency between cloud sites and cloud servers? You may find that if they are in separate datacentres, there may be a few milliseconds of latency added to each SQL query (depending on your application and the way it works) which could prove troublesome.

How regular are the 'node not available' errors? If they are once in a blue moon, you might be able to forgive the service, but if they are occurring regularly I'd try to get on to the support to investigate for you. If it is SQL related, you may find dumping and re-importing your database to a new database (perhaps you'll get allocated a different database node?) might resolve the issue temporarily.

[The_Dominator]

here is the big problem and we have seen it come up more and more

all the talk about the cloud hosting and benefits of Cloud (redundancy, high availability, scalability, ease of use/management, etc) forget the cost factor and uncertainty. You no longer have a steady monthly bill, you have a variable bill each month and as you get more successful - your bill rises. I would even question the benefits - most cloud infrastructures have all had major outages over the last 12 months - so it does happen.

Now, each person and company needs to examine all their aspects of CPU, Bandwidth, etc and determine if it makes sens to go to a cloud provider like racksapce or just go to rackspace or the planet and get a dedicated server

[ckeck]

Originally Posted by jpminus

I really like the whole idea behind the Rackspace Cloud Sites but at $149 (+$20 for SSL which I'll need) I can spend just a little more and get a dedicated server or even look at colocating my own server (which I already have so there's very little up front cost for me). I currently host about 50 sites spread across three different VPS's and would like to #1) Manage all from one spot and #2) not worry about managing and balancing my sites between the servers.

Hi jpminus,

I'm the Product Manager for Cloud Sites at Rackspace so I thought I'd chime in on a few of your questions here and see if I can shed some light. As you mentioned, the price of Cloud Sites with SSL can approach what you can lease some low-end dedicated gear for, but to keep in mind that you are running all of your sites on a single piece of hardware at this point and will be prone to single points of failure. This also leave you with a scalability issue should you hit any resource constraints, something you don't have to specifically worry about on the Cloud Sites platform.

As far as your specific questions...

1) Are they still battling the "Node Not Available" issues?

In short, no...this isn't a specific system "issue" so to speak, let me explain. Our load balancers have a timeout on connections of 30 seconds and this issue most often arises when customers have extremely un-optiomized app code or DB queries that exceed this threshold. Overall, this is fairly rare for customers to experience, but it does happen, and when it does we are more than happy to help diagnose the issue and sometimes help resolve as well. Optimizing a DB can be fairly simple sometimes and this more often than not makes this issue disappear. Bad code is another story though unfortunately.

2) Can you give any examples of your CPU Cycles? That part makes me REALLY nervous...I'd like to see some real world usage examples.

We have some great data on our FAQ that comes from real world benchmarks and insight from the 250,000+ apps hosted on the Sites platform. Here it is just in case you haven't seen it before:

How many compute cycles will my applications use?
Since web applications vary so greatly, it's hard to make a perfect guess. However, there are some guidelines that can help. First, you can think of 10,000 compute cycles as being about the same processing power as you'd get from an average dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance. For example 10,000 compute cycles would power:

about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system
about 11 million page views of rackspacecloud.com
about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image

Another quick note; only approx 5% of our entire customer base exceed the standard 10,000 compute cycle allotment. Typically extremely high traffic web sites.

3) Have the added any ability to unzip a file on the server? FTPing CMS's and CMS and updates takes forever and can be unreliable.

We don't currently provide this level of access, however we are looking to re-implement our graphical file manager in our control panel again that will give you this option.

4) Do you feel you made the right choice?

I'll let customers or former customers comment on this one.

-----

Let me know if I can be of any further assistance!

-Chad

[jpminus]

Chad..thank you so much for providing some input. I really did want to give the Cloud Sites a good try this time. I had wanted to awhile back but just had too many things going on so was unable to move my sites so I canceled what was then a $25/month cloud sites package you guys had done.

I was told by support that I can have the $100 price grandfathered but after 3 days of tickets, online chat and phone calls you guys wouldn't budge even though I've had the account since 2009 (not to mention 2 dedicated servers and another separate hosted email account).

I've scoured forums and blogs and come to the conclusion based on input of others and my own experience with the limited testing I had a chance to do that it MAY be nothing more than glorified shared hosting. For $169 a month I'm not willing to find out.


Below is the text from the ticket where I was told I can maintain the previous pricing....

Hello Jeff ,
Thank you for contacting support,
if your account was created before the increase you will pay the same rate that you used to.
If a new account is opened it will cost $149 per month

and then a couple days later..
Hello Jeff,

Per our conversation, we can not add Cloud Sites to your account at the old price of $100 per month. If you would like it added to your account it would be at the current price of $150 per month.


Anyway...I'll keep an eye out for it should you guys offer more flexible pricing but for now I have been very impressed by both VPS.net and Gigenetcloud.com

So for comparison of what $169 gets you:

{Storage / Bandwidth / CPU / RAM)
RS Cloud Sites 50GB Storage / 500GB Bandwidth
Gigenet Cloud: 175GB Storage / 500GB Bandwidth - 7Ghz CPU 4+ Ram
VPS.net 120GB Storage / 3000 GB Bandwidth - 7 Ghz CPU 4+ Ram

The Resources for gigenet and vps.net would be more but I have included a cPanel installation in my comparison since technically cloud sites comes with a control panel.

The beauty of the other cloud products are that at the current moment...about $70 is more than enough for me which was why I was willing to give it a shot at $100 but not $150.

[dazmanultra]

You have to remember that there is no server management involved ore required with RS cloud sites - so factor in the time (and/or money) spent configuring, maintaining and securing software and operating systems on a regular basis on the other systems because otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges which is a bit unfair.

[SmileyBri]

RackSpace Cloud Sites also provides a managed email solution, but I find the spam controls just as limiting as they are on Plesk. The ability to either drop or tag a message is as far as it goes.

I just don't understand how anyone can consider a solution that does not deliver spam to user accessible folder (like an IMAP folder called "Junk") and self clean that folder so that only x days or x size of messages will be stored is beyond me.

All anti-spam solutions, if they are any good at all, will get the occasional false positive. How can you not give the user the ability to check the spam bucket for lost messages?

This is my current rant. It is my problem with Plesk as well - no good solution to have SpamAssassin deliver mail to a user IMAP folder. It is really rather pathetic!

[fertubuy]

I find the spam controls just as limiting as they are on Plesk.