On 12 February 2009, 202 cities around the world held Twestivals, bringing together the Twitter community for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

$250,000 USD were raised to provide clean drinking water to over 17,000 people.  The Rackspace Cloud is proud to have been a part of Twestival, Austin, where $8886 was raised, and a proud sponsor of the event along with our sister company, JungleDisk.

Here’s the video of the first well being completed in Ethiopia:

And if you couldn’t make it, here’s a video composite of the event in Austin:

Status Pages Provide Transparency for Operations – These days, I find it’s a requirement for vendors to provide operational status pages on their services.  I say this because I know there are many companies who aren’t yet on-board.

Cost of clouds, Mosso/Slicehost vs AWS – Rackspace is truly fanatical about support, they really do give a crap, which is refreshing. What’s awesome is that the same quality of support is available for the Cloud offerings as is for their Managed Hosting customers.

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Moving to Mosso – If you hit a server node error, and continue to see the server node error although people on other computers can see your site just fine, try clearing your cookies. I know, I know – it sounds like bullshit – but when you clear your cookies, the load balancer will stop trying to send you to a non-existent node and will find a suitable working node for you.

The Power of Partnership: Mosso and Zapproved – The team at Mosso has been a critical component in our success. The solution they offer is extremely easy to implement, presents a great value and their “fanatical customer support” lives up to its name!

My Documents in the Cloud – So I am not automatically backing up this data using my secure backup monitor I have installed.  It takes all my data and moves it to the Amazon S3 Cloud every night.  I also now have a separate backup running which backs up my data to the Mosso Cloud Storage.

How To Register A Domain Name: Domain Registration Explained Easy – Let me start by saying I LOVE Mosso. Since I started using them. I haven’t had any major hosting problems, and any of the problems I have had, their tech support team (which is based in Texas, not India or the Philippines) gets it done right away.

Rackspace Hosting Appoints Lew Moorman President of Cloud Business – Cloud computing is the next step for business hosting and brings a whole new set of challenges and opportunities for Rackspace. Our investments in these new technologies have yielded strong results and we think the future model of hybrid hosting, the use of traditional hosting and cloud computing along with our trademark Fanatical Support will be a great combination for our customers.

Welcome Robert and Rocky – we know they will help us deliver a fanatical user experience to our customers.

We’ll be co-sponsoring the Accelerator event, hosted by Guy Kawasaki.  Immediately following the event we invite you to cross the street and join us in the park – where we’ll party with hookahs, hummus, belly-dancers and beverages!

This will be a great opportunity to chat with the Rackspace Cloud team as well as Rackspace Leadership.

We also have a few special guests to introduce, and we would love to share our vision of the future of hosting with you – we are busy building it today!

Cloud Sites, Cloud Files, and Cloud Servers.  Jungle Disk, Slicehost – the most complete and complimentary suite of web services and support offered anywhere!

Thanks to John Willis for the video.

Hook’em Horns! Gig’em Aggies! How ‘bout them Cowboys! Texas forever!

I’ve run out Texas propaganda, but am delighted to announce that slices are live in the Rackspace Dallas datacenter. We’ve been working hard on this since the announcement last October and it’s a big step for us. First, a huge thank you to all of the Rackers who helped turn up the new facility, they’ve been awesome and completely top-notch. Second, we are pumped to offer customers geographically diverse options for backup/redundancy/load-balancing purposes. Third, we have plenty of room to grow in the new facility and are working harder than ever on geeky goodies you are sure to love.

Now what does this mean? Q&A below.

Follow the link to read more!

Everything’s bigger in Texas… // Slicehost – VPS Hosting

1.  World-class technical support is only one click away.

Live support, with real humans based right here in our offices, is available 24/7.  And they are really, really good!

2. World-class technical support is free.

Yes, free.  As in you don’t pay for it.  And it is really, really good support!

3. You can get started in as little as one minute.

Not a programmer?  Not a problem!  You do not have to know how to code to use Cloud Files + CDN!  Our simple web-based interface makes it a snap to share your content!

4. Limelight is a tier one CDN provider.

Really, Limelight is VERY cool, and one of the foremost CDN provider’s in the industry.  That’s why we chose to partner with them!

5. No API is required to share files.

Did we mention this already?  If so, it is worth mentioning again!

6. Language-specific APIs are available, if you need them.

Not everyone knows ReST and SOAP, so we’ve created and provide support for the following language APIs – PHP, Python, Java and .NET. We do this to allow you to work in the language you feel most comfortable with.

7. Pricing for data transfer does not vary depending on edge locations.

Data transfer starts at $0.22/GB, no matter what edge location is used to share your content. This should make it easier on you when you are trying to estimate your monthly bill.

8. There are no per requests fees for CDN.

Just another way we simplify your life, and your billing.

9. There is no limit to the number of CDN-enabled containers you can create.

As far as we can tell, you can only have up to 100 distributions in Amazon’s Cloud Front system. At Mosso, we try to keep these types of arbitrary limitations to a bare minimum, not just for Cloud Files, but for all of the services we offer.

10. The Cloud Files GUI is easy to use and navigate.

Our browser based GUI let’s you easily upload a file and share it on CDN without writing a single line of code.  Heck, you don’t even need to know a programmer to share content via Cloud Files!

We’re proud to sponsor Freelance Camp San Antonio!  I plan on being there – probably from 10am-Noon (sorry, can’t be there all day).  But if you want to chat about cloud computing, Mosso, Rackspace, blogging, customers, Twitter, or what the Dallas Cowboys need to do to build a POST-SEASON team – stop by.  It is a great event with a great community behind it.

And we are glad to be part of it!

Imagine being able to provision a server in minutes. To upgrade it automatically. To bring servers up and down as needed. This is the idea behind Cloud Servers. Totally customizable, each Cloud Server gives you full root access to the Linux distribution of your choice. You pay depending on how large a server you buy.

Mosso: Freelance Camp San Antonio Sponsor | Freelance Camp

Rackspace kicked off 2009 with a skit performed by its senior leadership team.  The skit was a takeoff on the TV Reality show “Project Runway”.

So Lew Moorman, SVP of Strategy, showed up all dressed up as – the Cloud!

The Cloud was built using multiple smaller clouds to symbolize the redundancy of the cloud.  As explained by the “designer”, Emil Sayegh, GM of the Cloud Division, while actually popping one of those balloons on Lew’s back: “If one pops, there are a multitude of others that can keep our customer afloat, and unaffected”.

The “designer” Emil, is shown here:

  Emil explained that Cloud design was composed  of a revolutionary elastic material (Latex), “that stretches to accommodate the size of the customer, ‘petite’ to ‘plus’ sized customers”.  The Cloud is elastic, dynamic and flexible!

The event ended with good camaraderie, good food, and…a few kegs of beer.

No wonder we are one of the best 100 US companies to work for (again!).

Looking for a job?  Have amazing skills?  Want to have some fun? Join us!

We’ll continue to change when we need to change, and we invite your feedback to founders@mosso.com.