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I like the look and feel of Rackspace Cloud

Published on October 29, 2009 · 7:18 am UK · 23 comments

in NevilleHobson.com, Reputation, Technology, Web

rackspace-looking I’m still thinking about what to do concerning a hosting service for my blogs. This thinking period follows the appalling experience I suffered with DreamHost earlier this month in getting no responses from customer support when sites went down.

Days went by, not hours, before they responded to emails. I simply won’t accept that type of non-service, and that experience has completely destroyed the strong goodwill I have had for DreamHost since first being their customer in February 2006.

I’m not the only one with we-don’t-care-about-you experiences from DreamHost. Ask Bryan Person, for instance, and he’ll tell you about his over the past few days.

So I am leaving just as soon as I find a replacement service to move to. Switching your hosting service is not an act to take lightly, no matter what’s been happening.

Which one, though? Lots of helpful suggestions via Twitter, even a direct pitch or two, but I decided early on that I need to define more clearly what kind of service I’m looking for before making a jump.

These thoughts are among the many that are currently front of mind:

  • A service that says it really knows about hosting blogs like WordPress and Movable Type, and other social media content, gets my attention.
  • What doesn’t get it are those that emphasise how many thousands of email addresses you get, how to build e-commerce sites with a couple of clicks, setting up shopping carts, etc. Most seem to be like that.
  • I don’t mind where the host is located physically, just as long as they provide good and reliable service at reasonable cost, they reply in a timely manner when you get in touch with them, and others (especially in the UK) with WordPress blogs use them and say good thing about them. Not too much to ask, really.

So as part of my investigation, I joined a webinar last night offered by Texas-based Rackspace to learn about their cloud offerings, collectively Rackspace Cloud. A number of people have suggested Rackspace although I balked a bit at the $100 a month cost for one of their services, compared to the less than $9 a month I pay DreamHost.

But I have come round to see much of this as: you get what you pay for.

I was impressed with webinar presenter Mike Mozey who delivered some pretty technical content in ways I could easily understand.

From my rough notes:

readytalk
audio only with phone
q&a at end
used to be called mosso
160K apps
largest platform as a service
- Cloud sites:
not limited to a single server, but the computing power of the cloud
50 GB space, 500Gb bandwidth, 10K cycles / month
support not outsourced all from San Antonio, TX
- Cloud files:
content delivery, eg, media files
single data centre, Dallas TX, future Hong Kong, UK, Chicago

I asked a couple of questions, all of which were answered. Some were really simple yet Mike answered them in the same way he answered some complex technical questions.

One point I did want clarity on was help in understanding compute cycles. In the context of Rackspace’s deal of $100 a month that includes 10,000 cycles, it means:

Q: what are compute cycles?
A: 10k equal to about 2.1 million page views of db-driven site

I find that much better than a detailed technical explanation (which I can find on Wikipedia). And I reckon all my blogs and other bits and bobs would fit comfortably within that quantity of page views for quite a while.

I wonder why other hosting services, especially UK-based ones, don’t do a webinar. A very useful tool to support the sales process in a way that the potential customer doesn’t see as a sales support act.

Anyway, this post serves as much as a means of my thinking out loud as it does in telling a story.

On with the thinking! If you have any suggestions on hosting, or thoughts on what Rackspace offers, I’d love to hear them. Thanks.

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