The Rackspace Cloud Control Panel – Why It's Better
If you have been in the hosting business or simply hosting your own web sites for any length of time, you are probably familiar with the most popular commercial control panels on the market: Plesk, cPanel & Ensim. These control panels, while powerful in many respects often introduce more trouble than they are worth in the form of increased resource overhead, buggy implementations, cost, usability, etc.
The Rackspace Cloud has taken a different approach and decided to design and develop their own control panel in house from the beginning. Today, the Cloud control panel is an extremely powerful tool that is built specifically for the three product offerings from the Rackspace Cloud (Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers & Cloud Files). This control panel has many benefits over using a generic commercial CP, for example:
- Developed and built specifically for the Rackspace Cloud architecture
- Internal development means it can be more tightly integrated and we can be more nimble to customer feedback and feature requests
- Years of workflow improvements based on feedback
- Light and efficient
- Infrastructure runs separate from your Cloud environment so it does not utilize resources within your hosting platform and consequently cannot impact your sites performance/uptime
- Near real-time reporting on Cloud specific usage metrics (bandwidth, storage, compute cycles)
- Custom reseller functionality (Cloud Sites)
- Advanced built-in ticketing platform
- Web based file-manager utilities for Cloud Sites & Cloud Files
The Rackspace Cloud control panel offers different features for each product, so lets take a look at these individually.
Cloud Sites
- Quick view listing of all domains and sub-domains (searchable)
- 3 step linear process to add a new site (Linux or Windows)
- Near real-time reporting on bandwidth, compute cycles and storage
- Raw web server access logs
- Internal testing URL for each domain
- Multiple FTP user management
- Quick view for website features (email, databases, logs, advanced features)
- Domain Management (renewal, transfer, whois, nameservers)
- DNS Management (quickly add or change any custom DNS records needed)
- MX Record Management
- SPF Record Management
- SSL Certificate Management
- Email Management (free Rackspace Mail accounts with Cloud Sites)
- Spam Filtering & Handling Customization (per domain)
- Database Creation & Management (MySQL and MS SQL Server)
- TrueHybrid Technology Platform Management
- Scheduled Tasks & Cron Job Management
- Full Server-Side Paths
- Client/Reseller Management (Client List, Client Plans, Client Products, Client Messaging)
- Integrated file-manager offering FTP like functionality
View a video demonstration below:
Cloud Servers
- Quick view listing of all provisioned Cloud Servers (searchable)
- 1 step process to create a new Cloud Server
- Custom server names for easy server identification
- Near real-time reporting for bandwidth utilization
- Quick view for server information: current action, age, RAM, disk space, IP, data center, backups
- 1 step process to initiate a Cloud Server resize
- Web based AJAX console for logging into your server instances
- Soft & Hard Reboot Capabilities
- Rescue Mode (allows you to debug system issues that are preventing a server from booting to a usable state)
- Easy rebuild from a default OS image or backup server image
- Ability to reset server instance root password
- Delete server (stops your hourly billing at that exact time)
- DNS and Reverse DNS Record Management
- Backup Management (set schedule for daily/weekly backups and perform a variable backup on the spot)
- Server Diagnostics (server state, swap i/o and root i/o usage, server load, disk i/o and network i/o usage, CPU % utilization, CPU time, PING from multiple globals locations)
- API Access
View a video demonstration below:
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Cloud Files
- Integrated file-manager for managing containers & uploading data
- 1 click CDN publish capability
- Ability to apply a custom CDN TTL per container (default is 24 hours)
- Metadata editor
- Multiple file upload capability
- API Access
View a video demonstration below:
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General Features
- Quick view reporting upon login for each product
- Detailed reporting section for each product
- Billing Reports (overview, current invoice, billing history, billing settings)
- Account Contacts
- API Access
- Integrated Live Chat Support
- Developer Resources
- Cloud System Status
- Knowledge Base
- Customer Forums
- Support Ticketing
- Direct Support Phone Numbers
If you have any questions about any of the information listed don’t hesitate to ask me or head over to www.rackspacecloud.com and initiate a live chat (or simply give them a call).
[VIDEO] Installing JungleDisk Server Edition on Cloud Servers
Just a few weeks ago the JungleDisk team announced their entirely new product lineup including the highly anticipated server edition. For those unfamiliar, JungleDisk develops a custom backup application which can store your local system data in the Cloud on platforms like Rackspace Cloud Files or Amazon S3. It supports many advanced features such as block level updates, compression, de-duplication, AES-256 encryption and much more. There are three different editions available for a variety of use cases including: Personal Edition, Workgroup Edition & Server Edition. The pricing ranges anywhere from $2/month per user to $5/month per user or server depending on the edition plus storage fees ($0.15/GB on Rackspace Cloud Files).
I recorded a video tutorial showing the process of installing JungleDisk Server Edition on a Rackspace Cloud Server. Many customers ask about the best way to do file-level backups on Cloud Servers and now the answer is simple: JungleDisk Server Edition. This is a great supplement to the snapshot based image backups that are already available with the Cloud Servers platform.
Check out the video below and if you have any questions or want further information about JungleDisk, head over to their site at www.jungledisk.com. For more information on the Rackspace Cloud and Cloud Server, head over to www.rackspacecloud.com.
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If you have any feedback or thoughts please leave a comment – thanks!
Rackspace Cloud Servers vs VPS Platforms
Lately I’ve found myself in the middle of several discussions about how Rackspace Cloud Servers and other platforms like it (Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, etc) differ from traditional VPS environments. While there are similarities, they are by no means the same thing. Let’s take a quick look at some of the key differentiators and advantages.
A Cloud Server is a virtual dedicated server instance based on our custom implementation the Xen Hypervisor that run on very robust hardware. These server instances offer truly dedicated and protected resources which isn’t the case with a VPS (virtual private server). While you may get a small portion of dedicated memory, there is generally no dedicated CPU allocation, disk i/o, network i/o, etc. In addition, most VPS providers only offer smaller amounts of resources, 256MB-1GB of memory and no options above this. And the largest problem by far is VPS platforms are typically oversold, so one physical host machine is running far too many customers and this turns into a resource allocation nightmare causing server crashes or poor performance (or both). There is no isolation from other customers.
With a Cloud Server you always get the full amount of allocated memory, CPU, network i/o, etc that you are paying for and there are some great perks as well, such as the ability for your CPU allocation to burst when there are free CPU cycles on the host machine or when it is heavily underutilized. So often you end up with far more CPU allocation than what you are paying for as the host servers powering Cloud Servers are never oversold.
Now, that being said, lets talk about some of the real “cloud” features…
Instant Provisioning
Spin up one, ten or 100 Cloud Servers in real-time via our control panel or programmatically via our robust API.
Resource Granularity
No need to worry about finding the best fit between 2 or 3 options. The Rackspace Cloud offers a wide range of instance sizes so you can ensure you are paying only for the resources you need at that time.
Near Instant Scaling
One of the best features of the entire platform is the ability to instantly resize (in near real-time) your Cloud Server instance with a few clicks in the control panel or an API call. Once this event is triggered everything else is automated and takes only a few minutes (depends on how much data is on the instance). Your new instance either larger or smaller will be created and a snapshot of your current Cloud Server is taken and restored to the new instance moving over all your data and configurations (no data migration or reconfiguration necessary). Once you confirm that everything is working with the new Cloud Server instance you can finalize the resize which moves your IP address(es) to the new server instance.
Hourly Billing & Utility Bandwidth
Utility billing is essential for any Cloud platform and something else you will not find from a VPS provider. You pay for your server instances on a per hour basis, so if you only need an instance for a certain amount of days/weeks that is all you pay for. Or if you need to move up and down on your resources you continue to pay only for what you are using. Bundled bandwidth is also something the VAST majority of users don’t exceed. We have broken this out to save you even more money instead of bundling it into the cost which always carries a dollar amount to it.
No Bloatware Installed
No control panels or other software installed by default, Cloud Servers give you straight SSH/command line access to your Linux server environment just like you would have with your own dedicated server. If you choose to install a control panel, you certainly can, but we do not make this decision for you.
Cloning
Server cloning allows you to provision a brand new Cloud Server instance on the spot from any of your current Cloud Servers which will contain all that servers data and configurations. You can also launch a new Cloud Server anytime from a backup image from any other server on your account.
Persistent Storage
This isn’t necessarily a difference between Cloud Servers and VPS platforms, but data persistence is a huge feature of the Cloud Servers platform when comparing to other Cloud infrastructure platforms such as Amazon EC2. Your data on Cloud Servers is stored on a local high-performance RAID10 array on the host server, so even in the event of a hardware failure your data is safe and will be there when the server is brought back online, unlike Amazon EC2 where all that data in memory simply disappears unless you have another storage solution implemented.
These are just a few of the big differences between a true Cloud hosting platform and a VPS environment. If you have any questions or feedback leave a comment below.
Reselling Rackspace Cloud Servers
Yesterday my colleague, Mike Mozey, posted a great article on reselling hosting services using the Rackspace Cloud Sites platform. Since then we have received several inquiries about reselling our Cloud Servers platform so I thought I’d post some thoughts on this subject.
Cloud Servers does not yet have built-in reseller functionality in our control panel and it may be some time before we see something similar to Cloud Sites implemented. This leaves you with a few different options:
- You can leverage the robust Cloud Servers API and develop your own front-end control panel for communicating with our services programmatically. This would allow your customers to login to a custom interface (you would have to build) for your specific brand and perform the same functions you would in the Rackspace Cloud control panel. This option would require intensive development work, but you could essentially put your own face on top of the Cloud Servers infrastructure and have your own management portal for each customer.
- If you don’t want to go so far as to build your own control panel for your customers, some of our current resellers have a custom sign-up process for their customers that trigger the deployment of a Cloud Server and the customer is simply provided with the IP address of their server and the root login credentials. You would still need to implement your own usage tracking and billing portal for your customers, but there are many open-source and commercial products that you can leverage for this piece.
- Another common method for reselling using Cloud Servers (not necessarily reselling Cloud Servers themselves) is to offer standard shared hosting type plans by carving up your server instances. You can do this with a wide variety of open source software or commercial control panels such as cPanel/WHM. The great benefit here in comparison to offering this type of hosting on a dedicated server is the fact that you can easily scale up your resources as your customer base increases. Purchase for actual demand, not planned demand and you will save a lot. This is the power of Cloud hosting.
I hope this article helps to clarify some of the questions about reselling the Cloud Servers platform. It may take a little more work and the implementation of an outside billing system and some custom development, but it allows you to be highly flexible with your business workflow. If you have not seem the API guides for Cloud Servers or Cloud Files be sure to check them out.
If you have any questions feel free to email me or post a comment below and I’ll get you an answer!
UPDATE: One important thing I forgot to mention is that the Rackspace Cloud is soon going to launch their new reseller program which will provide volume based discounts to registered resellers. So if you build up a large client base leveraging the Rackspace Cloud platforms not only can you add your own value to our infrastructure but you will receive discounts on your monthly service at different tiers based on your monthly recurring charges. The more services you resell, the lower it will cost you which only increases your profit margins more.
