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How it works

Upload Your Site to the Cloud
You can create a new Rackspace Cloud powered site in less than five minutes. Load balancing, clustering, and redundant storage are all inherited by your application automatically, without any effort.

cloud-2 Scaling When You Need It
Right from the second you upload your websites to Rackspace Cloud Sites™, your sites are hosted on advanced clustered cloud computing technology designed for high-performance. When your site outgrows what's included, you pay inexpensive scale pricing for exactly what you use on the cloud and nothing more.

Cloud Computing Built on Industry Standards

Many of the new cloud hosting platforms require that you use custom code and architecture. Cloud Sites™ is designed to run your applications with very little (if any) modification. Cloud Sites™ is a powerful hosting platform built on existing web standards and powered by proven technology that you know, trust, and use regularly. You get the benefits of a scalable cloud platform without spending time coding custom APIs or data schemas. Whether you're looking to resell web hosting services, or manage dozens of your own websites, Cloud Sites™ gets you on the Cloud quickly, easily, and with lots of room to grow.

The Technologies Behind Cloud Sites™

01. Run Linux or Windows (or even both)
Behind Cloud Sites™, cabinets full of both Linux servers and Windows servers power the over 100,000 sites and applications we host for our customers.

Every Windows-based page is served from clusters built and optimized especially for Windows, and every Linux-based page is served from clusters built and optimized especially for Linux. We use advanced load-balancing technologies to automatically detect the type of technology you are running and route each request to the proper pool of servers.

This is a great example of the power of cloud computing, since you no longer have to make a hosting choice between Linux and Windows. Both LAMP and .NET are included, allowing you to choose the technology you need site by site (or even page by page). The best part is that the cloud technology that can power both will probably cost you less than even one server of either type.

Will your site or application run on Cloud Sites™? Most popular apps like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and .NETNuke run really well. If you have a question about your own code or needs, we can help right now over live chat.

02. Powerful Load-balancing
The older and more common way to host websites is to load as many as will fit onto one server. Cloud Sites™ is different, because your sites and applications are loaded across large pools of servers, and the traffic you receive is balanced out to entire fleets of servers.

It's the technology large, popular sites use to stay online because it solves two important problems. First, if a server fails, the other servers in the pool can continue to respond to requests for your site, and visitors often never notice a problem. Secondly, when your site gets suddenly popular, all the traffic being received can easily overwhelm a single server and ruin your moment in the spotlight.

FAQs

What does The Rackspace Cloud use for a storage system? Have you done anything there to make it redundant?
Nothing as important as your website should be served from a single hard drive, but you'd be surprised by how many web hosts have little more redundancy than a pair of crossed fingers. We're different and for good reason. The advanced architecture powering our hosting solution uses groups of high-performance, network attached storage devices to reliably serve every web page, and image. Inside each storage device, drives are mirrored to each other in a RAID configuration to create a first level of redundancy. And, as a final precautionary measure, all data on the system is automatically backed up on a repeating schedule.

How often does The Rackspace Cloud backup information?
The entire Cloud Sites FTP structure is backed up every four hours, which totals six daily backups. Those backups are rolled into a nightly backup, which are retained for two days. However, these backups are for disaster recovery on the server side. If for any reason a storage node on our side were to crash, our backups will be there to replace any lost data.

That said, we recommend that you make periodic backups of your site and data to your local computer since we are unable to extract an individual site's data from the nightly backups. If you need a backup of your MySQL or MS SQL databases, they can be exported through our online utilities (MySQL or MS SQL) or by connecting directly to the servers using desktop software.

What version of Linux does Cloud Sites™ run? What about for Windows?
The Linux side of our platform is built on Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Red Hat Enterprise Server. On the other side of the fence, the Windows platform runs on Windows 2008 and IIS 7. You can find a list of Linux and Windows technologies at the following link.

I've had shell access in the past. Why isn't it offered on Cloud Sites?
Shell access (also commonly known as SSH access) is not offered on Cloud Sites, primarily for security reasons. Keep in mind, however, that many functions typically accessed via shell are available on The Rackspace Cloud, including cron jobs, file permissions, and unzip. You can also do many SSH type functions by mounting your FTP location locally using SSHFS. More information can be found here.

Finally, if full shell access is required, check out our Cloud Servers™ offering. Contact us for pricing and details

Cloud Sites™ Scaling

What are compute cycles?
Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on The Rackspace Cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

How many compute cycles will my applications use?
Since web applications vary so greatly, it's hard to make a perfect guess. There are, however, some guidelines that can help. For example, 10,000 compute cycles would power approximately:

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

How do I track my compute cycle usage?
The compute cycles you use are presented in your control panel in near real time.

What goes in to calculating a compute cycle?
Mostly, CPU processing time. However, compute cycles also account for the disk I/O your application's operations consume. For example, a page with heavy database queries will consume more compute cycles in part due to the larger volume of disk I/O it requires.

Will my web application scale?
There are many factors that impact how easily a web application can scale, including the application's code and its architecture. Rackers are ready to review your web application/solution and provide guidance on how to optimize it for Cloud Sites™. If an application is not properly built for scale, Cloud Sites will not be able to compensate for it. Also, if you are expecting a massive surge in traffic (perhaps your site was featured on Oprah) please contact us in advance and we will help you prepare for it. Please contact us via chat, phone, or ticket to find out more.

Is .NET 4.0 supported on Cloud Sites™?
.NET 4.0 is currently available on our Cloud Sites environment. If you would like to have .NET 4.0 enabled on your site, please contact Support via ticket, chat, or phone.

Do you have a smaller Cloud Sites package?
At this time we do not offer any smaller packages. If you would like, please submit and vote on your feature request here.

JoomGO! is a reseller for Rackspace Hosting and provides packages for a price that you can not get (as an individual package) from Rackspace directly.