Chad Keck DOT Com

Well it looks like I’m about to embark on my first real vacation since I started working at Rackspace over three years ago! Yeah, I’ve been that busy, but it has paid off. Heading out this Friday!

Zahra and I are going to head up to Woodland Park, CO where my parents just finished rennovating a small house. They also have a cabin in the area as well that they bought and fixed up years ago, but I have yet to make it there. If you know me personally, you no doubt know that I get stuck traveling quite a bit for work which, in my opinion is not very fun because you never have much time to go see things – its just get the work done and get back to the office ASAP.

We are going to relax with NO work involved and visit some places such as: Pikes Peak, Cripple Creek, Mollie Kathleen Mine and whatever else we can find. Pictures and some HD video to come once we get back (from my new Canon SX200). It’s going to be a blast – and you can’t beat the cost of the lodging – FREE. Thanks Mom & Dad!

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I’ve posted video demos for Cloud Servers and Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud, now lets take a look at Cloud Sites, which is the flagship cloud platform from Rackspace.

Cloud Sites is a fully managed platform-as-a-service hosting architecture which makes it unbelievably easy to provision new web sites and web applications on enterprise grade hosting infrastructure. Because the entire infrastructure is managed by the Rackspace Cloud team up to your application/code there are some limitations in the level of access that you have to the environment and the amount of customization that you can achieve, but the benefits of the platform FAR outweigh any inconvenience caused by this. Essentially, my general rule is that if what you are looking to host will work in the Cloud Sites environment, RUN IT ON CLOUD SITES.

No platform offers greater levels of scalability and redundancy out of the box. From the moment you provision a site/app onto Cloud sites it is load-balanced across multiple physical web servers and specialized database clusters as well. All centrally managed with the best hosting control panel in the industry, business class email from Mailtrust (a sister company), and direct file-system access via FTP/SFTP. Cloud Sites can also easily be used in conjunction with Cloud Files and Cloud Servers.

For $100/month there is simply no other compelling offer in the market, especially when you factor in the 24×7x365 LIVE Fanatical Support delivered by the Rackspace Cloud / Mosso team.

I posted some video demos showing the functionality of the control panel as well as performing some basis tasks within the platform (FTP, database management, etc).

Adding A New Site

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Creating & Managing Databases

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FTP

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A few days ago I posted a video demo/tutorial showing how to get started with Rackspace Cloud Files & the Limelight CDN component to that platform. I have another tutorial complete showing off the new Cloud Servers platform and how easy and quick you can deploy new virtual dedicated server instances and manage those servers. This is an amazing platform with significant advantages to running in a traditional dedicated environment and it also has many benefits in comparison to other clouds in terms of usability, reliability and cost. More information here: www.rackspacecloud.com

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Below is a short video tutorial I put together showing how easy it is to get up and running using the Rackspace Cloud Files platform. It demonstrates uploading content to Cloud Files through the file manager utility in the Rackspace Cloud control panel and how to enable caching through the Limelight global CDN network with just a few clicks.

In fact, the video you are watching below is being served straight from Cloud Files through Limelight! Fast isn’t it?

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Strong web site performance, reliability, and uptime – these are all traits you would expect from an enterprise-class Cloud hosting platform, right? That is exactly how I feel now – and exactly what I expected almost three years ago when I started looking at the very early cloud hosting platforms of the time.

My name is Chad and today I am a Mosso employee. Long before I joined the Mosso team, however, I enjoyed (sometimes) hosting many of my own web sites and those of friends, colleagues, family, etc. Back in late 2006 I was looking for a better platform for the sites I hosted. I was tired of trying to manage my own solution, and I was frustrated with the downtime and poor support of all the VPS providers I had used over the years. Cloud hosting was a very new concept and, in fact, I don’t think it was even referred to as “cloud” just yet, but there were two main providers in this space at that time: Mosso & Media Temple. Like many, I was concerned about the initial concepts but very intrigued with the technology so I splurged and purchased hosting accounts both with Mosso and with the Media Temple Grid platform. I decided to do some testing on two basic fronts: response time & uptime. As you may have figured by now, one platform excelled in comparison, and I was so intrigued that I ended up coming to work for Mosso!

So now, in early 2009, I thought, “Why not duplicate those same tests and see what the results would be?” And that is exactly what I did. I set up identical static web sites serving a 100KB image and identical dynamic sites, a vanilla WordPress 2.7.1 install on both platforms (Cloud Sites from Mosso and Grid-Service from Media Temple). Next I decided to leverage Pingdom for all the testing, as they have a wide variety of testing locations around the world. These tests for uptime and response time were performed via a full HTTP check (not ping) and occurred in 1 minute and 5 minute intervals on different copies of the static and dynamic sites. I set the test to run during the middle of a typical business week and collected roughly 72 hours of data.

The results were very impressive. Uptime percentages for Mosso Cloud Sites were a solid 100% compared to about 99.0% on average with Media Temple GS, and downtime stuck solid to zero seconds, while Media Temple was down 1-5 times across the different test sites resulting in almost 30 minutes of downtime on average per site. Average response times for Mosso Cloud Sites were at least half of that of MT GS, with Cloud Sites sometimes operating almost as much as five times faster!

This test is easy to duplicate if you would like to try it firsthand. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Please see the results below and you can see the direct Pingdom reports here: http://www.pingdom.com/reports/ndv2m2bh6fnw/

I did it – Saturday evening I proposed to my girlfriend! She is the most amazing person I’ve ever met and its clear that we share a love like no other. We have yet to be apart since the day we met and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I knew from the beginning that I had fallen for her, from the moment she opened her door the night I picked her up for our first date (seriously)

If you had asked me before I met her if I believed in love at first sight I wouldn’t have known what to say, but today I can firmly respond that yes, there is absolutely such a thing! How often does it happen? I don’t know, but I can tell you that it is amazing and I will be forever grateful for being so lucky.

I am the happiest person alive and I actually owe it all to my Mom who set the two of us up. So thank you Mom for everything! See below for some pictures of Zahra and I (and the ring of course)!

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Well, I have submitted my registration and paid up for The Drivers Edge event in Nov at Texas World Speedway. This will be my first time racing on a track in my new Audi — it is going to be awesome!

I’m hoping to get a few tweaks done to my car beforehand though:

• New Brake Pads, SS Brake Lines, Racing Brake Fluid
• Stasis Quad Exhaust Kit

I also have to pick up a helmet and maybe some other unnecessary racing gear.

Wish me luck!

Well after a ~5 month wait my custom ordered 2009 Audi A5 S-Line has finally arrived. I have to give a huge shout out to Nathan Spencer over at Cavender Audi who helped me through the entire processes and actually moved me into an unexpected allocation which shaved months off my order time (thanks Nathan!). The car is beautiful, everything I thought it would be and more. I’m really glad Audi changed the S-Line seats to Alcantara, the faux suede is awesome. I’m still breaking in the car “somewhat” easily, so I haven’t gotten on it too hard, but for being the 3.2L V6 it has some POWER, especially in DYNAMIC mode via Drive Select — another MUST HAVE if you are picking up an A5/S5. Gas has been great, B&O sound is great, lots of trunk space. I just cannot say enough good things about this car. My only complaint is that I liked the Nav system in my Lexus better, and I believe Audi has a brand new MMI/Nav system coming out later this year that I’m going to miss out on, oh well. I took some shots yesterday after cleaning my car for a few hours, enjoy!

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Just testing out the new Wordpress iPhone application. So far I’m impressed. More to come…