I have a gadget blog that currently has about 5-6K unique visitors daily and about 8k-9k+ pageviews a day. It’s currently hosted on VPS. Occasionally I’ve had some problems with the VPS but overall it’s fine. Well, I’ve heard and read about cloud servers using distributed nodes/instances that could spread across many locations or data centers. In another word, cloud shall be in better performance while compared to VPS. And conceptually cloud should respond better than the VPS does, since it consists of many nodes that spread across different locations. If your blog or website that has huge worldwide traffic then cloud shall be the best hosting to consider. So, I was wondering if I moved over to cloud, I’d have managed to get more traffic due to the geographically-spread nodes.
One of the pioneers in cloud hosting is RackSpaceCloud. I did have a quick chat with RackSpaceCloud. The answer I’ve got is cloud is almost like dedicated hosting, where you don’t get CPANEL. You’ll only be given SSH shell access. If you wanna have a blog hosted there, you have to install your own Wordpress, MySQL. These could be lots of hassles for those who lack of technical capabilities. To me, these are all fine as I’ve been supporting lots of Linux environments and web hosts.
But after googling around for “rackspace cloud server reliability” and having read the what WebDevNews have posted about their experience with RackSpaceCloud, I’ll need to think twice and do more research before moving to cloud.
Apparently, WebDevNews didn’t have good experience with Rackspace Cloud, when they moved their blog onto cloud servers on RackSpace cloud and they had very bad problems with the WP Cache, MySQL and .htaccess – the essential elements on a popular Wordpress blog. And their blogs had about 600+ pageviews a day (about less than 10% of my gadget blog) during the time when they were on RackSpace cloud.
So shall I move to cloud after reading the bad experience of WebDevNews? I guess I need more research before making the decision. The RackSpaceCloud starts at a basic of $11 per month and the bandwidth is additional cost that costs 7¢/GB in and 22¢/GB out. So, how much bandwidth do you need for a blog that has 5-6K daily unique visitors? It seems like you’ll only know once you’ve got onto cloud for a start first then you’ll be able to know how much you need. And increase from that on……
Alexia,
Cloud is overhyped and is NOT in several Datacenters. It’s in one-single Datacenter – that’s such a myth. Look at went Rackspace went down (2 times in a few months) and the cloud sites were down…
Stay on a VPS and crank up your resources if you need more.
Comment by Cloud Facts — January 24, 2010 @ 2:08 am
Ummm 2 times in a few months sounds kinda bad …. Btw I’ll probably have a try since RackSpace cloud offers at $11 for a start. Well, I’ll need to find out more what actually the bandwidth in and bandwidth out mean
Or maybe to explore more on Amazon cloud as well 
Comment by Alexia V — January 24, 2010 @ 2:25 am
Alexia,
I’m a Rackspace Cloud Sites customer. Cloud Sites did have 3 down times in the past 3 months, though 2 of those times were about 10 minutes each (which is still inexcusable) and the other was about half hour. I’m giving them one last chance and if they have another down time, I’m switching to someone else.
With that all said, I’ve been really happy with them except for the down-time, which I seriously hope they won’t have any more of. Their control panel is very simple and intuitive. I’ve had some serious traffic spikes and it was able to handle them easily. I’ve got W3 Total Cache working with my Wordpress sites and it’s worked fine. I used to use SuperCache and that worked fine too. Their customer service has always been really good too, especially the live chat.
The main complaint I’ve had off them has been the downtime and as long as they’ve learned all their lessons, I’ll probably stay with them for many more years.
PS: If you plan on using their Cloud Sites offering ($100/month) for your hosting, check out this article I had submitted to them as a guest blog based on my experience with setting up many, many Wordpress sites:
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2009/12/21/wordpress-hosting-on-rackspace-cloud-sites/
Comment by Melvin R. — January 24, 2010 @ 3:20 am
Hi Melvin,
Thanks for the tips
downtime about 10 minutes should be tolerable. I had once a very experience with my vps i.e. it was down for almost 5 hours 
And have also experienced about a 5-minute pause which could be due to VPS got rebooted…. $100/month sounds a bit more expensive. We’re now charged for $50++ per month with VPS 
Comment by Alexia V — January 24, 2010 @ 3:57 am
Actually, they recently increased their price to $150/month so excuse my outdated info. It is more expensive than a VPS but it offers auto-expanding based on demand on the websites so I wanted the extra security, mostly for the safe-guard of my clients.
Their Cloud Servers are pretty affordable too. I was using that before I moved to the Cloud Sites. For $43.80/month you can get a 1024 MB RAM & 40 GB storage server. If manual setup is your thing, it’s no big deal but I wasn’t a big fan for simple Wordpress sites. I like to be able to create a new site in 2 minutes.
The deal with the bandwidth in/out is that it’s based on how much data is being transferred in and out of your server. So if you upload a 100MB to your website and then it’s is downloaded 10 times, you’ve used up 1GB of out bandwidth and 0.1GB of in bandwidth. Pretty straight forward stuff. It boils down to whether there will be a lot of data being transferred in and out of your sites. If you are transferring a lot of data, you might consider http://www.slicehost.com which is now owned by Rackspace and includes chunks of bandwidth.
Comment by Melvin R. — January 24, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
Ummmm… our VPS cpanel currently shows we consumed a total bandwidth about 140 GB in Dec 2009 and every month was about 100GB+ in 2009, lets consider all these are out bandwidths, so it’ll likely cost $30++ on top of the $43.80 for a 1GB RAM + 40GB storage, that makes up a total of $70++ a month..
We had bad days which we suspected it could be caused by limited resources of VPS, causing our site with some connection problems for several hours. But after a reboot of the VPS it was then back to normal. So, we are wondering if there could have been some other more hours of slowness or connection problems that we didn’t notice, which even affected the growth of traffic for the site, as we can’t monitor it for 24×7….. The move to a better host such as a cloud is definitely a better choice. $70+ a month should be a good start
Comment by Alexia V — January 24, 2010 @ 11:26 pm
Ya and if you expect to be running at higher than normal demand, you can easily resize your server to be a bigger, more powerful server. That usually takes about 10-20 mins if your server doesn’t have a ton of data on it and it can sometimes happen faster. I recommend just getting a cloud server and messing around with it. It’s billed hourly so if you decide you don’t want it after 8 hrs, you’re out like a buck or something. (Slicehost though is billed daily so it’s not exactly the same.)
Comment by Melvin Ram — January 25, 2010 @ 1:31 am
websiteblitz do hosting on a linux server for $10 a month and their servers are in australia at distributeit. also usually if you go from linux to squarespace you will need your website rewritten as they use .net ….i keep getting told that there is no charge for conversions but i bet it is factored in somewhere!
Comment by Ray Shaw — February 14, 2010 @ 10:41 pm