How much time and effort have you put into your WordPress website? What would it cost you to replace it all from the beginning? How many hackers are knocking on your website’s doors and windows right now to see what gives way?

Setting up a backup solution should be the first thing you do after installing WordPress. As the author of UpdraftPlus – the highest-rated backup plugin the wordpress.org, and one of only two automated backup plugins to have scored eight points at rankwp.com – I’m really pleased to see Rackspace Cloud Files as a fully supported cloud backup option.

While developing for Cloud Files, I appreciated its easy-to-use web interface. I had no problems with it “under the hood” either. UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore supports backups into Cloud Files fully:

• It supports all setups that WordPress supports (including Windows servers and PHP 5.2,  which is still used by 62 percent  of WordPress sites, but is not supported by many backup plugins; see http://wordpress.org/about/stats/).
• It supports all sizes of website. No matter how big the created backup zip archives are, it can upload them into Cloud Files in chunks, and resume from wherever it left off – automatically, without you needing to watch it.
• It’s not just a backup plugin – UpdraftPlus also includes easy downloading of your backups, and easy restoring from the WordPress dashboard.
• Comprehensive help and commercial support is available; see http://updraftplus.com.

It also offers all of the standard features you’d look for in a backup plugin, including:

• Easy setup without jargon – just a single page with a few simple options: When do you want your backups to run, and where do you want to send them to?
• Automatic scheduling – choose to run your backups multiple times a day, once a day, weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Choose how many backups to keep historically (i.e. automatic deletion of unwanted backups).
• Email notifications – receive a message when your backup completes.

UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore is tried-and-tested; it has an estimated 20,000 active users, according to rankwp.com. And, best of all, it’s free. For more advanced users, a premium version with professional support and more features is also available.

Setup on Cloud Files is very easy, you just need to copy-and-paste the “API key” from your Cloud Files console into the settings, choose the name of a container and you’re done. Press the “test” button, and it’ll confirm that everything is well.

To get started, use the usual WordPress plugin installer from your dashboard; or for a full guide with screenshots, go to http://updraftplus.com/download/. Don’t put it off, because the hackers won’t.

Rackspace Cloud Files helps Purzue serve millions of media files without worrying about storage limits or CDN. Jamie Aquila, the company’s chief technology officer, says Purzue is heavy in user-generated content, and this made handling storage a costly and time-consuming endeavor until the startup migrated to the Rackspace Cloud.

“When we were introduced to Cloud Files, we thought, ‘Bingo.’ We don’t have to worry about the storage, and we don’t have to worry about connecting to the CDN,” says Aquila. “Cloud Files handles that for us, to the point where we’ve totally ditched our own storage and our own servers. We rely on Rackspace for everything.”

Aquila means it when he says everything: in addition to Cloud Files, Purzue makes use of a full portfolio of Rackspace products, including Cloud Servers, Cloud Databases, and Cloud Load Balancers.

Thanks to Cloud Files, handling millions of user-uploaded media files is no longer a hassle, Aquila says. An open-standards API allows other applications to communicate directly with Cloud Files, which makes for a hands-off, automated process.

“As a CTO of a growing startup, time is money,” says Aquila. “If I’m wasting my time with moving files, building servers, and making sure databases aren’t crashing, then that cuts me out of managing the work that is being done in-house, improving our product and making it more successful.”

For more information on how Rackspace Cloud Files helps Purzue manage millions of media files without worrying about storage or CDN check out this case study.

Last year, Saint Francis High School (a college prepatory Catholic school in Mountain View, Calif.) initiated a one-to-one program that loans an iPad to each of its 1,700 students and 100 teachers for the academic year. The students now use these devices for everything from providing dynamic feedback in class to creating presentations, collaborating on lab projects and making movies.

At first, the school’s technology services department struggled with how to most effectively distribute content to 1,800 iPads. The solution? Rackspace Cloud Files. Cloud Files gave St. Francis easy-to-use online storage for files and media that can be delivered over the Akamai content delivery network (CDN).

Larry Steinke, Saint Francis High School’s technology director, says the school needed a solution that would allow iPad users to download files while onsite at the school and at home. To meet this need, they set up an on-site caching solution so that files accessed from the Internet would be cached locally, and they chose Rackspace to host the files off-site.

How does the system work?

“If someone is on-site and they download files that we’ve distributed through our iPad management software, they’re getting them from our caching appliance—but really they’re coming from Rackspace as a point of origin. If they’re at home and choose to download content, they’re getting it from Rackspace as well,” says Steinke. “Rackspace is our single point of distribution for providing content, applications, and things of that nature to over 1800 iPad devices.”

With an entire school relying on technology to get them the content they need, when they need it, Cloud Files has become a central part of the solution for deploying Saint Francis High School’s ambitious iPad program.

Read more about how Cloud Files has helped enrich the educational experience for students and teachers at St. Francis in this case study.

Running a startup is hard. Especially, when there are only two people. When we first started building Work for Pie, we knew we needed solid, existing solutions to some of the basic problems that arise when building a software as a service (SaaS) platform. One particular problem that we faced was how to handle file storage.

Work for Pie is a web service that allows companies to build rich single-page profiles that tell a story: What is it like for a developer to work here. Likewise, developers can build their own profile/portfolio that aggregates content from various other services, such as Github, Stack Overflow and LinkedIn. The overall goal of the site is simple: Let Great Developers Find Great Companies.

There’s really no magic under the hood, and we use a fairly simple and common set of technologies. We’re a Django shop, and our production stack includes nginx, Redis, memcache and PostgreSQL. This stack runs well on Rackspace’s Cloud Servers, but we knew early on that we’d have customer-uploaded images, and that we wanted a scalable, robust solution for storing and serving that media.

That’s where Cloud Files first caught our attention. It’s a scalable solution for file storage, but it’s also backed by an industry-leading Content Delivery Network (Akamai’s CDN), which means our content loads quickly, and our site’s visitors have a much better experience. Cloud Files also supports content delivery over SSL. Since we decided to serve all content over SSL, that’s an important feature for us, and our visitors don’t get confused with those pesky unsecured content warnings!

Cloud Files offers a great solution for file storage and content delivery with features that we need, but the benefits for us don’t stop there. Frankly, one of the real selling points was the API (application programming interface), and python-cloudfiles — an open source python wrapper for that API. This allows us to programmatically interact with the service. For example, we automatically perform nightly database backups, and then our backup script can store those in a private Cloud Files container.

Another open source application, django-cumulus, seamlessly allows us to use Cloud Files as the default file storage option in Django. This means that we don’t have to do anything different while building our application in order to store our customer’s content in Cloud Files. We simply write our application as if we were storing files on the local filesystem. In fact, an early version of our site did just that, and part of our decision to use Cloud Files in the first place was due to the ease with which we could use Cloud Files with a very minimal change to our existing codebase.

In conclusion, Cloud Files has been a great asset to our company. It is a great service, and when paired with some great open source tools, it has allowed us to build our product more quickly and reliably than we could have done otherwise.

Learn more about Work For Pie and how it uses Rackspace Cloud Files in the case study “Cloud Files Powers Next-Gen Job Searches” in the Rackspace Knowledge Center.

One way to optimize your website is by making it static. With a Cloud Files account, you can create a static website by using a CDN-enabled storage container. Your website can be hosted entirely from Cloud Files, without needing any servers. Hosting a static website on Cloud Files and the Akamai CDN gives your website incredibly quick load times and increases website reliability.

See It In Action

Rackspace’s Hart Hoover used this approach for the Rackspace DevOps blog, transitioning the site from Cloud Servers to Cloud Files. In his words, the solution was “stupid easy and extremely scalable.”

How To Implement

To create a static website using Cloud Files, start by creating a CDN-enabled storage container. Any HTML or static web pages in the container will become available through a static website once you set the X-Container-Meta-Web-Index header to index.html or other index page of your choice. You may also create subdirectories in your website by creating pseudo-directories, as outlined in the pseudo directory section of this guide. Each pseudo-directory becomes a subdirectory in the website.

Note: The page you set for X-Container-Meta-Web-Index becomes the index page for every subdirectory in your website; each pseudo-directory should contain a file with that name. So, if you set X-Container-Meta-Web-Index to index.html, you should have an index.html page in each pseudo-directory. If you do not have the named index page, visits to myhost/subdir/ will return a 404 error.

1. Upload your pages to a container.
2. POST the X-Container-Meta-Web-Index on the storage container to set the index or other primary page of your website. You must write your storage URL and the container name to properly point to the container (<storage URL><container name>)
3. CDN-enable your container.
4. Go to your domain host and set up a CNAME to your CDN URL.

Have Questions?

Visit the Open Cloud Community, where we have set up a thread on this topic to answer any questions you have.

You can easily speed up your website by offloading static content (such as images, video, audio, basic HTML files, JavaScript and cascading style sheets) to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). With a CDN, your data is stored in edge locations all around the world—meaning that your data gets delivered faster. It simply doesn’t have to travel as far from the server to the end user.

Rackspace Cloud Files uses the blazing-fast Akamai CDN. And because it’s seamlessly integrated into Cloud Files, it’s super easy to use.

See It In Action

TruQC, a Rackspace customer, uses Cloud Files and the CDN capability in its iPad app. Hear TruQC’s story:

How To Implement?

1. Log into the Cloud Control Panel.
2. In Cloud Files, create a container and make it public (enable CDN). Remember that the container name should have no breaks, spaces or special characters; and unlike a folder or directory, a Container cannot have sub-directories. All your content will be at one level below the Container name.
3. Upload your files into the container.
4. After you’ve uploaded your file, you’ll see the file available in the Cloud Files list. Select the socket next to your file and then select View All Links and you’ll then be presented with four different ways to deliver your file over the CDN.

Learn more and see screen shots.

Have Questions?

Visit the Open Cloud Community, where we have set up a thread on this topic to answer any questions you have.

To ensure its iPad app delivers on its promise, TruQC relies on the Rackspace Cloud. The company uses Cloud Files for all photos, signatures and documents as part of its new TruQC Document Library in v2.0 of its iPad app.

Here, TruQC CTO Benjamin Chute discusses why his company chose the Rackspace Cloud to power its iPad app.

If you are interested in learning more about how Cloud Files can speed up your website or application, check out our Media Hosting pages:  http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/media

Here are a few of the major media trends you can expect your websites and applications to encounter this year and how Rackspace can help.

1. Users Are More Mobile Than Ever

It’s been two years since smartphone shipments surpassed PC shipments, and our move toward mobile computing is accelerating. Smartphones, tablets and e-readers were on nearly everyone’s holiday shopping list in 2012. Research shows that these mobile devices are fueling more 24×7 web surfing, particularly after 6 p.m., when tablets and other mobile devices are used more often than computers. There’s no question that mobile users are consuming massive amounts of media content.

Advances in 4G technology have also contributed to mobile users’ appetite for high quality video and audio streaming. Much like the transition to broadband access changed our surfing habits and spawned new innovation (e.g. SaaS), the transition to 4G will do the same. New applications will be created for new use cases and higher quality video/audio streaming will change how we consume entertainment (e.g. TV, games, movies).

2. Users Expect Speed And Reliability

Web sites and apps are using more images, JavaScript and cascading style sheets, which can significantly slow down page load times. In fact, the average web page has experienced a 57 percent increase in size over the last two years. User expectations are increasing as well – research shows that a majority of users expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less. And those expectations vary by device: 89 percent of tablet, 59 percent of smartphone and 83 percent of PC users expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less. Mobile users in particular want faster web pages – 71 percent expect web pages to be as fast or faster on a mobile device than on a desktop.

If you manage an ecommerce or advertising site or a social media app, slow page loads can be a real pain. And even the slightest lag can result in lost revenue (it’s estimated that every second of delay in loading your page can reduce sales conversions by 7 percent).

File downloads, too, need to be fast. Your customers want software downloads and updates, documents and subscription-based content as quickly as possible. Downloads are bandwidth hogs, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of users across the globe simultaneously downloading large files.

3. Users Love Visual Web Media

Video, images and now infographics have become staples in a web-powered world. To put the video revolution into perspective, web users streamed nearly 27 billion videos in August 2012 alone. Advances in social media and mobile device streaming have further fueled the use of videos and pictures. Picture this: Facebook users upload 300 million photos on an average day. At Rackspace, some of our most popular blogs have been infographics on topics ranging from ecommerce to healthcare in the cloud.

What Do These Trends Mean To You?

Consider the following:

• Almost every website or application has multiple forms of media that need to be delivered to different devices – this puts a burden on the entire web platform.
• Managing media is a big deal: storing, encoding, delivering, streaming and archiving.
• Your users demand instant gratification. They want video and audio that streams quickly with no hiccups; images that load swiftly; and downloads that are lightning fast. They won’t settle for less; and neither can you.

In other words, you need to make your media management simple, fast and reliable.

How Can Rackspace Help?

With Rackspace Media Hosting, we offer you the ability to deliver video, images, audio and other file types at blazing speeds. We do this in part by using Rackspace Cloud Files powered by the Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN), which speeds up web page load times to give you more views, better search engine rankings and more sales conversions, which ultimately translate into more loyal customers.

We know your customers won’t put up with an unreliable site or sluggish media delivery. With Rackspace Media Hosting, you host your media on Cloud Files, which lets you serve it from 213 global Akamai CDN edge locations. This gives your media a stronger chance of staying available during a high traffic event or even a DDoS attack. What’s more? Your files are replicated three times, making media storage more reliable.

We also want to simplify how you deliver media to your customers. With the easy to use Cloud Control Panel and an easy to follow pricing model, it’s a snap to get started. It’s a breeze to upload and manage files through the control panel or the API and it’s easy to estimate what it will cost.

Here’s just a sampling of some of the benefits that our Media Hosting offers:

• Quick delivery: Position your website’s images, video, audio, basic HTML files, JavaScript and cascading style sheets closer to your end users for super-quick performance.
• Reliable, scalable storage: Store as many videos, audio clips or documents as you want. Your files are replicated three times, making your media delivery more reliable.
• Easy-to-use advanced features: Get CDN SSL encryption for security; HTTP compression to save bandwidth; streaming for a better user experience; and edge purge capability to keep your media content fresh.
• CDN analytics: Gain insight through access to third-party tools that turn your CDN access logs into simple graphics and charts.
• Simple pricing: Our charges are straightforward and we don’t charge for most extras.

And, of course, Rackspace Media Hosting is backed by our award winning Fanatical Support, which will help you get the most out of your media solution. Whether you have questions or need a solution to a problem, we’re available by phone, chat or ticket 24x7x365.

I love hearing from customers about the exciting results that they are seeing. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Michael Borohovski, President and CTO of Tinfoil Security, and he said “Prior to using Rackspace, the page load times on our company’s website were unacceptable. After we switched to Cloud Files and the Akamai CDN, our website pages now load incredibly fast.”

If you want to test your web site, check out this free tool from Pingdom which will analyze your page load speeds. Kick your media delivery up a notch with Rackspace Media Hosting on the open cloud. Sign up for a Rackspace cloud account if you don’t have one already; and get started hosting your media with Cloud Files powered by the Akamai CDN. You and your customers will be happy you did.

Rackspace Cloud Backup has been available to all of our cloud customers for about five months now, and in that time you’ve taken full advantage of getting automatic backup and storage for your Cloud Servers. We’re so excited that you’re using it for fast, frequent and easy backups.

As you know, Cloud Backup is file-based, as opposed to image-based, so you can restore and update a single file, versus having to back up the whole server image. You can also specify which files and folders you backup and restore, or, if you want to, you can restore the entire backup. Ultimately, you can protect your business, save some money and keep your data secure (we offer AES-256 encryption for data at rest and in transit).

And, recently, we’ve made some key updates to Cloud Backup.

What’s New In Cloud Backup?

We’ve seen a lot of success with the new agent release (v1.05.005848) for Rackspace Cloud Backup. This release contained a number of bug fixes and optimizations. And we heard even more feedback from you, our customers. Today I want to highlight a couple of significant enhancements that will make your backups, and your life, easier.

The new agent release adds Vault integrity checking and Vault self-healing (the “Vault” is where your backup data is stored).  That means we automatically periodically check the integrity of all the blocks of data that you have backed up and look for any data blocks that may be corrupt. If any corrupted data blocks are found, we search your system for the original data; re-upload the data block; replace the corrupted data block with the new data block; and then perform the integrity check again.  If you are one of the many customers who have not yet updated to the latest release, please update to take advantage of these great new features!

This Knowledge Center article can walk you through the update: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/update-the-rackspace-cloud-backup-agent

Some Cool Cloud Backup Stats

Ultimately, Cloud Backup is all about you and ensuring your data is safe and secure. And we’re stat geeks – for us, the proof is in the numbers. So we thought it’d be cool to look at some interesting statistics around how and when you use Cloud Backup.

• Backup Frequency: Sixty-six percent of you perform daily backups, while 15 percent backup weekly, 10 percent backup hourly and 9 percent backup manually.
• Most Popular Backup Day: For those of you who do weekly backups, Sunday is the biggest day; with 47 percent of you performing backups on Sunday. Saturday is a distant second with 19 percent, followed by Monday, 13 percent; Wednesday, 10 percent; Friday, 6 percent; Tuesday, 3 percent; and Thursday, 2 percent.
• Backup Run Times: Backup run times vary widely, but the most popular times you perform backups is between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.; and the least popular time is the 12-hour window from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m.

How frequently do you perform backups, and when? Why did you pick those specific times? We’d love to hear from you. Comment here and let us know.

As you can see, we’re excited about Cloud Backup and how you’re using the product. We hope you are too.

If you want more information, you can check out the Cloud Backup website (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/backup/) or our Knowledge Center (http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/product-page/cloud-backup).

Over the past couple of months, we offered insight into OpenStack straight from some of its largest contributors via our “How I Contribute To OpenStack” blog series. Here, we take a look at some of the impactful things the participating contributors said (and some of my favorite quotes).

It’s All About The Ecosystem
The only way OpenStack achieves its ultimate potential is by fostering the largest, most diverse ecosystem possible. That cannot possibly be done by any few developers, any single company or any foundation that guides it. The sum total work of hundreds of companies, thousands of developers and every user around the world will be what allows OpenStack to change the world. ‘Nuff said. – Nebula Inc. Senior Developer Gabriel Hurley

Top Notch Developers
I learned a lot from the code written by top notch developers who are very experienced in their fields. Any OpenStack project source code is a very well written large scale Python project case study. – Intel Software Developer Zhongyue Luo

The People Share The Code
With OpenStack … “given enough brains, all features are easy,” simply because the code base is that much more accessible to a wider developer audience. I will add that fundamentally it is not companies that share code, it’s people who do. And they are not only sharing their code, but also their effort, their dedication and their time to contribute to an amazing platform, and that’s what we all love about OpenStack. – hastexo CEO and Co-Founder Florian Haas

A Global Community
It’s great to just head to your local OpenStack community meet-up and start a few conversations to see what people are doing. Hundreds of developers worldwide working on an open design you can influence; making open source code that you can change; and a community that’s ready to welcome your contribution … need more be said? – NeCTAR Cloud Architect Tom Fifield

Quickly Addressing The Needs Of Many
In terms of benefits: quick turn-around of fixes is certainly one. When it comes to features, many companies involved means that feature design and implementation has to address the needs of many, which can be a good thing. – Internap Senior Software Architect Armando Migliaccio

Cooperation And Openness
The OpenStack community leaders have done an outstanding job of engendering a sense of cooperation in such a large group of contributors. The collegial attitude, combined with an openness to new ideas and a shared commitment to following the structured development process make it easy to join and contribute to the project in a meaningful way. As a result, the community has grown quickly and with a level of diversity exceeding the other open source projects I am familiar with, but without losing track of the shared goals that brought us all together in the first place. – DreamHost Senior Cloud Engineer Doug Hellmann

Power In Numbers
The sheer number of extremely talented developers alone is an incredible benefit. In addition, you have perspectives from every major player in the industry. Developing a platform that takes the best ideas from all of them means you end up with the best platform possible. – SolidFire Software Engineer John Griffith

The Best Ideas Win
Open development is another attempt to “uncover better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” Indeed, if you compare the “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto” to the values that many large, successful open source projects are built around, it’s very easy to see they have much in common.  All of this is a roundabout way of saying that open development is one proven model for building great technology. It’s a model where you put self-organizing teams in the driving seat, where you value craftsmanship, where you trade control for innovation and where the best ideas win. – Red Hat Principal Software Engineer Mark McLoughlin

Want to share your thoughts about OpenStack? Comment here or email us at blog@rackspace.com.

And check out our coverage from OpenStack Summit San Diego.