I’ve been on the Rackspace Cloud now for over a year and it’s been a terrific boon. I can’t say enough about the service (personal bias of having been a former Mosso support intern aside) and the quality of the product keeps getting better (though my account is in the seemingly more stable SAT data center). If you can afford the high buy in value ($100/month) it’d definitely the way to go if you’re a small startup or a freelancer. If you don’t trust yourself to deploy and maintain your website server then you can’t beat the fact that the Cloud handles all updates and provisioning for you and scales to your needs. Having worked on the inside does give me some insight as to how this all comes together and how to leverage the technology platform my websites sit on but between a robust knowledge base and a super helpful support staff anyone who wants to dive in can optimize their site for the could which leads to both better performance and an improved bottom line.
The use of compute cycles as a metric was brand spanking new concept when they began to roll it out last summer and we had to field a lot of calls on what exactly it was that was being measured and what people could expect to be charged. The measurement is an attempt to calculate computing resource usage. At first the company attempted to charge by file hits. This though would lead to sites with a lot of pictures causing more hits than a text site. Clients looking to game the system would figure out ways to combine images and resources to reduce file hits without necessarily reducing resource usage. The compute cycle algorithm (which is proprietary and classified above my position at the time) looks at CPU cycles, memory usage and Disk I/O amongst other things to determine how much computing power a site is taking to load. The good news is that most people don’t have to worry about it. Most accounts I saw were well under the 10,000 allotted cycles (estimated compute cycles used by a fully utilized dedicated server in a month) and many of those accounts had plenty of websites using resources.
If you’re interested and would like a $25 discount off your first month sign up for Cloud Sites at https://www.rackspacecloud.com/signup and use this discount code REF-BOXOROX. Also check out the Cloud Files and Cloud Server offerings (I’ll have more on those some other day).