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:
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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 Drupal 6 on Cloud Sites
Yesterday I posted a video tutorial covering how to install Wordpress on the Rackspace Cloud Sites platform. This video was a huge hit so I wanted to put together another one showing another extremely popular platform deployed onto Cloud Sites, Drupal.
I’ve used Drupal personally for many years on various projects and it is by far my favorite CMS platform for a variety of reasons, most of which revolve around the massive community. Watch the video for a step-by-step walk through with some quick performance notes as well which will ensure your Drupal site runs and scales smoothly within the Cloud and uses as few resources along the way as possible.
If you have any feedback or ideas for other video tutorials please leave me a comment or drop me a line on Twitter (@ckeck).
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UPDATED: Adding A Site To Rackspace Cloud Sites
A few of my former video tutorials for the Rackspace Cloud are slightly out of date due to new releases of the Cloud control panel. So I decided to record some new videos so no features are left out. Enjoy this short clip that walks you through the process of adding a new domain to the Cloud Sites platform.
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Rackspace / Mosso Cloud Sites Demos
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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