Our hosting solutions are backed by the leaders in cloud hosting. They provide world class hosting with world class support.

In the interest of providing our clients with world class web hosting. We offer Rackspace cloud hosting to our customers. With Rackspace Cloud sites, performance, availability and customer service troubles are in your past. Small business and large swear by Rackspace, if you have hundreds of users, or millions. Rackspace automatically scales to meet your needs with no user intervention.

What is Cloud Computing?

Simply put, cloud computing is a set of pooled computing resources delivered over the Internet. The cloud delivers a hosting environment that doesn't limit an application to a specific set of resources. Depending on the platform, an application can scale dynamically and increase its share of resources on-the-fly.

Why use Cloud Computing?

The cloud can quickly scale to thousands of servers to make resources available as they're needed. Rackspace Cloud hosting customers never need to worry about buying new hardware to meet increasing traffic demands or huge traffic spikes.

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.