Rackspace Cloud

[Mike Hughes]

I tend to think of cloud hosting as distributed computing on the internet. In theory it should:

- Eliminate the server as a single point of failure.
- Scale cleanly as you need it rather than fall over if the load get's too high.
- lead to faster loading pages.

From what I can see, rackspace are now selling it as cloud 'servers' rather than 'hosting' with the proposition being that you pay for a set number of virtual servers in their cloud. You can then increase / decrease how many of these you want (and what spec they should be) within minutes.

I guess this explains why the service might be slow (if capacity has been under specified) but I'm not sure it's a positive move.

Mike

[chris ashdown]

I think it's about time to retire, this all makes my head hurt

[Andy Warner]

From what I can see, rackspace are now selling it as cloud 'servers' rather than 'hosting' with the proposition being that you pay for a set number of virtual servers in their cloud. You can then increase / decrease how many of these you want (and what spec they should be) within minutes.

I guess this explains why the service might be slow (if capacity has been under specified) but I'm not sure it's a positive move.

Mike

almost - they have a US service that has 'servers', 'files' and 'sites' - i.e. you can 'rent' virtual servers and load them up with your software, development environments etc, you can have files that are a 'distributed network' in effect, or a 'virtual server' foir web sites.

The UK roll-out doesnt have the 'sites' option - you have to take the server option, and do EVERYTHING yourself - its an unmanaged virtual server in a distributed data 'cloud'.

seems i knew more than i thought!

i'm running www.legendgames.co.uk on the US based cloud sites option.