Rackspace Archive

A couple of weeks ago, technology blog Techcrunch was hacked. At the time of the hacking they were using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service as their hosting provider.

Today I noticed that everything  on Techcrunch is now pointing to WordPress.com. If you run a traceroute of the techcrunch.com domain, it points to WordPress. Images and static files (e.g. s3.wordpress.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch) are also hosted by WordPress. Most likely this means that Techcrunch has moved off of the Rackspace Cloud Service and has become a VIP customer. GigaOm is another popular blog that is also hosted on the WordPress VIP service.

Assuming I am right and Techcrunch has moved to WordPress.com for hosting, it’s interesting how short of a time they were hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. I have pinged a couple of Rackspace employees and will update this story once I get any further details.

Update: I can now confirm that Techcrunch has moved to WordPress VIP hosting as noted in their footer. Rackspace employee Robert Scoble has also confirmed the move in the comments. It will be interesting to see if they continue to run the Rackspace advertisement going forward. It does appear the other sites in the Techcrunch family are still hosted on Rackspace – they could be in the process of moving.

CenterNetworks is currently hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service (we pay full price, actually lately we’ve paid a lot more than the base rate). I’ve never posted a full accounting of all of the good and bad of using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. Alison Gianotto posted an open letter to Rackspace management last month. In January Rackspace raised their Cloud Sites base pricing by 50% for new customers.

This evening Rackspace sent a notice to all current customers of the Rackspace Cloud service (formerly Mosso) about some changes to the pricing structure for their Rackspace Cloud service.

The big change is a 50% increase in the base price for all new accounts. The old pricing had a base of $100/month and the new pricing has a base of $149/month. Current customers will remain at the previous $100/month pricing.

Rackspace notes the reasoning for the increase, “Although the price for Cloud Sites has not been changed for over three years, the cost of managing the Cloud Sites platform has increased.  We felt it was necessary to update prices for new customers to reflect the value provided from the service, while still remaining very competitive versus other cloud platform as a service offerings.”

The reduction comes in a change to the overage charges which are now $0.22/GB which is a reduction from the $0.25/GB previously charged. Rackspace notes that this decrease is to align better with their other cloud service offerings.
Continue reading “Rackspace Raises Base Cloud Sites Pricing 50% and Reduces Overage Charges” »

Hosting company Rackspace has announced that they will be launching a Chicago datacenter in late 2009. From the announcement, “Rackspace will lease approximately 36,700 square feet of raised floor space, consisting of 5.633 megawatts of available critical load, from a subsidiary of DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc.”

Rackspace notes that their “cloud” business is what’s driving the expansion. Formerly known as Mosso, the Rackspace cloud computing division is known as the “Rackspace Cloud”. I am not sure if the entire space will be used for the cloud computing division or if other Rackspace customers will be serviced in Chicago (it looks like the latter). We currently host the CN network of sites on Rackspace.

Additional techy notes from the announcement:

• Rackspace believes that this lease with DuPont Fabros will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility.
• The Chicago facility maximizes operating efficiency through an enhanced power capacity and flexible design with N+2 redundancy on all major systems including heat rejection systems, generators and UPS systems.

Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud hosting division has announced a new partnership with Limelight Networks today that allows Mosso customers to use Limelight’s content delivery network (CDN). Mosso notes that, "this union brings unlimited online storage, scalable content delivery, and application acceleration services, thereby allowing businesses to more easily and affordably distribute content to millions of end users around the world."

If you are new to CDN services, the simple concept is that servers are placed around the world and depending on where you are located, you get served via the closest or most appropriate server. CDNs cut down on the hops back and forth to handle a request.

Mosso’s pricing for Cloud Files with CDN starts at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 22 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth from any edge location around the globe. Stored files can be up to 5gb in size. Apparently you can activate the CDN service on any file by accessing it via the Mosso admin control panel. It makes sense for large video and audio files along with large volume sites.

As many of you know, we are hosted on Mosso. Mosso has continued to improve reliability and customer service since we joined back in March. However, when I see deals like this I get excited for the possibilities but wish that they would spend more time making Mosso work like a normal webhost. There are several items including IP addresses referrals (every user looks the same) that just don’t work right and cause big issues when trying to process users appropriately.

Last month Mosso/Rackspace announced their cloud computing strategy.

Hosting company Rackspace has announced that they have acquired Slicehost and Jungle Disk today. Rackspace also has launched their overall cloud computing strategy at an event in Austin. In addition, Mosso, our host, has been renamed to "Rackspace Cloud Hosting". Here are the details on the cloud computing strategy for Rackspace:

• Cloud Sites– Rackspace’s flagship cloud offering, The Hosting Cloud, is now Cloud Sites. Developed by Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud division, it offers a scalable platform for handling huge traffic spikes and a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. Cloud Sites is a heterogeneous environment, supporting both Windows and Linux.
• Cloud Files — Rackspace’s internet-based storage service, CloudFS, is now Cloud Files. Cloud Files gives developers instant access to an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure and reduces overall investment and IT costs while providing infinite scalability. Cloud Files offers an industry leading SLA and a highly competitive pricing model with replicated storage starting at $0.15/GB. Also later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to allow developers to easily distribute content to millions of end users around the world and bring scalable content delivery and application acceleration services to the masses. While continuing to support the Amazon S3 platform, Jungle Disk will port to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system in the coming months. Jungle Disk comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
• Cloud Servers — This new hosting solution, which will deliver on-demand server capacity to businesses of all sizes, will leverage key technology developed by Slicehost, which uses Xen virtualization software. Slicehost will remain as the company’s developer brand, creating innovative new features driven through shared intellectual property in conjunction with development initiatives from Rackspace. As part of the announcement, Slicehost also announced new, larger slices for high performance computing, lower prices as well as IP sharing for high availability computing.

ReadWriteWeb has more information on Slicehost and Jungle Disk. Slicehost has more details on the transaction as well.

Cloud hosting provider Mosso (part of Rackspace) is announcing the launch of CloudFS today in private beta. CloudFS is similar to Amazon’s S3 simple storage offering. Pricing will start at at $0.15 per gigabyte, upon release, including replicated copies for data protection. The CloudFS pricing appears to be a bit less expensive than the new Amazon S3 pricing.

One of their slides states, "No charges for incoming or outgoing bandwidth for Rackspace and Hosting Cloud customers." My guess is this means that file transfers won’t incur charges but bandwidth usage will still be charged. I have a confirmed call with Rackspace at 10am and will update this post accordingly.

CloudFS is available as both a standalone service or as part of Rackspace/Mosso hosting packages. If you want to apply for the private beta, complete the application here.

For this new file sharing service to compete with Amazon, they will need to "woo" developers over. A little bit of a cheaper price won’t be enough. Amazon recently changed their support model to offer paid premium support. With hosting being a commodity, support can be a major differentiator. While my review will come later this week (see below), so far the quality of support personnel that Rackspace/Mosso offers has been very high. I have been impressed with the knowledge, intelligence and easy-to-understand people they have on the support team.

CenterNetworks is currently using Mosso (for the past six weeks) and my review will be posted later this week. The twitter version is that the first two weeks were a complete disaster, since then it’s been solid. I’ve had good conversations with the Mosso founders over the six weeks and my review will cover everything. Grab the RSS feed to be instantly notified when the review is live.