New WordPress plugins are ready for use

The updated WordPress one-click installer also includes two new WordPress plugins: Root Relative URLs and WP Super Cache.

Root Relative URLs

This plugin converts all URLs to root relative URLs for hosting the same site on multiple IPs, which results in easier production migration and better mobile device testing.

Key Benefit: The Root Relative URLs plugin enables seamless transitioning between staging/production host environments and debugging/testing from mobile devices. On Cloud Sites, it is used to fully render the page on the test link so developers can see sites in development with full CSS. This is an alternative to having the WordPress installation fully deployed only on the test link.

Click here to learn more about the Root Relative URL plugin.

WP Super Cache

This plugin offers a very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

Key Benefit: The WP Super Cache plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. This will help you cope with high traffic events such as a front-page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

Click here to learn more about the WP Super Cache plugin.

Previous Cloud Sites Product Updates

• Boost Cloud Sites Performance with PHP and .NET upgrades
• WordPress One-Click Install
• Upgrade to MySQL 5.1
• Upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• Upgrade to PHP 5.3 and .NET 4.0 and more

As always, we welcome your feedback on Cloud Sites and your experience with these and other features on our product feedback site.

The upgrades are among some new and upcoming features we highlighted for customers in August, and follow the November launch of WordPress one-click install.

A list of the latest versions of all software currently supported by Cloud Sites is available here.

Boost Performance On Your PHP Sites With PHP 5.4

Key Benefits Of PHP 5.4

PHP 5.4 introduces a number of new features that make your PHP sites perform up to 50 percent faster compared to PHP 5.3.  Some of the key features include:

• New language syntax including Traits, shortened array syntax and more
• The PHP default charset is now “UTF-8″
• $this can now be used in anonymous functions

Other features include always on short tags (<?), the ability to represent integers in binary and support for callable type hint. PHP 5.4 is also deprecating register_globals, magic_quotes and safe mode.

See the PHP 5.4 Release Announcement for more details.

Migrating To PHP 5.4

You are welcome to migrate your site to PHP 5.4 at any time, just please ensure that your application is compatible with version 5.4 prior to your update.   We intend to support both PHP 5.3 and 5.4, and we do not have plans to require customers to upgrade from PHP 5.3 to 5.4 at this time. Click here to learn how to migrate.

Improve Performance On Your .NET Sites With .NET 4.5

Key Benefits Of .NET 4.5

The new features available in .NET 4.5 can help you achieve a significant performance boost for web-server workloads. This includes a reduction (up to 35 percent) in both startup time and in the memory footprint of web hosting sites that use ASP.NET. Some of the various performance improvements for web hosting include:

• Multi-core JIT compilation for faster startup
• Bundling and Minification
• Improvements to HttpRequest handling
• Asynchronously flushing a response
• New ASP.NET Request validation features

See the Microsoft ASP 4.5 documentation for more details.

Migrating To .NET 4.5

You are welcome to migrate your .NET site to .NET 4.5 at any time, just please ensure that your application is compatible with version 4.5 prior to your update.   We do not have plans to require customers to upgrade from .NET 4.0 to 4.5 at this time. Click here to learn how to migrate.

Enjoy!

Previous Cloud Sites Product Updates
WordPress one-click install
Upgrade to MySQL 5.1
Upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Upgrade to PHP 5.3 and .NET 4.0 and more

As always, we welcome your feedback on Cloud Sites and your experience with these and other features on our product feedback site.

Do you love Rackspace Cloud Sites? Share why. Click Here

Tip: Ask how many other customers are hosting your favorite application with the hosting provider

I’m surprised how many people forget to ask whether their preferred scripting language is supported by a provider, and if so, which version is supported.

Ask your prospective provider these questions:

• How many other customers are using the application that you want to use — say WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla?
• Do they provide Windows Server® or Linux?
• Which versions of PHP, .NET, Python and Ruby does the hosting provider support?

Verifying that the provider offers the languages and apps you want will prevent a lot of heartache when you go to create your site.

Tip: Consider the level of server control you need

Do you need full server control? Or do you never want to deal with the server at all?

Some advanced developers need SSH access to customize their environments. But if you don’t want to get into the real nitty gritty on a server, then you don’t need this. (Hint: If you don’t know what SSH access is, then you don’t need full server control.)

Tip: Consider cost

Of course, you want a provider you can afford. But while price per month is definitely a factor, it should not be the deciding factor. Know your budget, get answers to the questions above and then choose the provider.

Also, don’t forget to ask what is included in the package:

• How many domains can you host without paying extra?
• How much bandwidth and storage is included?

Knowing this will help justify the cost of a provider who may offer better service over the long term, but costs more.

I hope you found these tips helpful in choosing the right managed hosting solution for your websites.

Be sure to check out previous tips for choosing a managed hosting provider.

We love our customers, now we want to hear how our customers love us.

Has Fanatical Support^® made your life easier? Are you a Rackspace promoter? Share with us which Rackspace product you love and why. You can also share it with your network of friends and colleagues in two quick steps.

Click Here to zhare.

Step 1: Pick Rackspace in general or a specific Rackspace product:

Step 2: Pick how you would like to share it with your friends and us:

Choose Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Don’t forget to use the #rackspace hash tag – this will ensure that we see it.

Thanks for sharing the love.

You need to ensure that your site can handle the traffic during The Oprah Effect or when your company’s CEO is on CNN; when your promotion is featured on Groupon; or when your latest blog gets to the front page of Reddit.

First, consider how important scalability is to you. Ask yourself: what is my site’s peak traffic in an hour, a day or a month?

Scalability is not easy to measure. That’s because it’s not only dependent on your hosting provider, but also on your website code (e.g., code optimization techniques being used) and your website’s content (e.g., how media-heavy your site is). If there is a memory leak in your code, then even the best hosting provider will not be able to scale your site at prime time.

Tip: Find out how many visitors or page hits your provider can handle

In general, we can safely assume that most clients of any hosting provider will not write crappy code. So when you find out the average number of visitors per month for each site a provider hosts, you will get a ballpark idea of how much traffic the hosting provider is handling.

Ask the provider:

• How will they help you if you are expecting a huge spike (say a million visitors in few hours)?
• Do they have any references of high traffic events that they have handled for other customers?
• How many visitors (or web requests) per month do they handle on average?

Or you can easily calculate the latter, if you know answer to following two questions:

1. How many visitors (or web requests) can the hosting provider withstand in a year?
2. How many websites are they hosting?

Just divide part one by part two and you have a ballpark figure “X.” Now, this number “X” is an average — about 50 percent of websites handle more traffic than this. So if your website gets anywhere less than 10 to 15 times “X” in pageviews (or web requests), then it’s a good sign (provided your website is optimized).

Tip: Notify your provider of expected traffic surges

Remember: if you are expecting a spike due to an event, let your hosting provider know about it a week or so in advance. That way, they can prepare. Don’t just tell them a day before if you are expecting a million visitors!

For context, one of our Cloud Hosting solutions, Rackspace Cloud Sites, handles 500 billion web requests per year from approximately 400,000 websites. On average, each site has 125,000 web requests per month.

But when a site is highly optimized and the admin gives us a heads-up about heavy traffic due to a particular event , the solution has easily handled millions of visitors in few hours.

When you choose a hosting provider, there are also some “nuts-and-bolts” considerations you shouldn’t ignore. Next week, I’ll talk about making sure you have access to the apps you need, and as much or as  little server control as you want, at a price you can afford.

Be sure to check out previous tips for choosing a managed hosting provider.

Six “9s” (99.9999 percent) of uptime requires million-dollar, continuous-availability servers. So 100 percent uptime is not something any hosting provider can deliver consistently.

But you need to maximize uptime. So ask yourself how many 9s of availability you need, keeping in mind that more 9s will mean a more expensive solution. On average, how much downtime per week is acceptable to you?

• 1 minute (99.99 percent uptime)?
• 10 minutes (99.9 percent uptime)?
• 100 minutes (99 percent uptime)?

Tip: Ask these questions to your prospective hosting provider

• Is their status posting publicly available (e.g. https://status.rackspace.com/), or do you need log in to see the status of their systems? This tells you how transparent the company is about its uptime.
• How much uptime is guaranteed?
• How much will you be compensated if you experience less uptime than the guarantee states?

If it is difficult to find answers to these questions, or if what you find is hard to believe, then you should be suspicious.

Tip: Validate uptime with third-party sites

Also, you should check with third-party experts who track the uptime of major hosting providers every day. For example, Netcraft tracks the uptime of all major hosting providers every 15 minutes: http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters.

In order to provide that uptime, a provider has to be able to handle traffic spikes. In my next post, I’ll talk about scalability and how well a provider handles sudden surges in traffic.

Be sure to check out previous tips for choosing a managed hosting provider.

In this post, we’ll look at another crucial feature: availability and quick support.

Tip: Call the hosting provider at 3:00 a.m. to see whether they are available.

Before buying the solution, try reaching the hosting provider via phone and chat at odd times (late nights, holidays, long weekends, etc.). If they are available, then there is a good chance that when there is a problem, you will not lose sleep or peace of mind.

Also, keep in mind that not all managed hosting providers offer support via phone. So don’t forget to find out whether you can even call them in the first place!

Once you’ve determined that the provider is available, you’ll want to evaluate whether they can actually resolve problems in a timely manner.

Tip: Find out the problem response and resolution times

Imagine you were waiting for an event where you planned to market a product, and you created a website or a blog to tell the world about your product.

Then, just when the event starts, you notice that load time of your website is 10 seconds. That’s unacceptable!

So you call your hosting provider immediately and hear “Your call is important to us and your average wait time is 20 minutes.” Frustrated yet? As the seconds tick by, your audience is evaporating, your SEO is adversely affected and you’re losing money.

When evaluating your hosting provider, always ask:

• What is the average response time for a phone call or chat?
• What is the average resolution time for a phone call or chat?

If your don’t get an answer — or get a vague answer — that’s a red flag for a managed hosting solution.

This is especially true if you are building websites that are seasonal in demand — say an e-commerce site that makes over 50 percent of its money during Christmas and New Year’s. In this case, you definitely want to make sure that you have a good managed service.

Good managed service requires well-trained experts who resolve customer problems quickly — and these experts are not inexpensive. True, not all premium hosting providers will provide great support. But no lower-priced hosting service can afford experts.

The bottom line: if you don’t want to deal with servers, and want an expert to help you when you need one, then cheap solutions may not be very cheap in the long run.

To provide a basis for comparison, the average response and resolution times for Rackspace Cloud Sites customers are less than 30 seconds and 18 minutes respectively.

Of course, ideally you’d love to never have to call tech support in the first place. To minimize your need for help, you’ll want to look into the provider’s uptime. We’ll cover that topic next week.

Many people — especially in small businesses — don’t know what they don’t know, so they just rely on recommendations from trustworthy sources (like friends, colleagues, agencies, or consultants), then move their sites.

Unfortunately, once they have made the move, they are often stuck with that solution for better or worse, since moving the site from one provider to another can be so painful.

Asking for recommendations from trustworthy sources is a good thing. But since your friends’ and colleagues’ requirements for choosing a managed hosting provider might be different from yours, you should also do your own due diligence.

In this series, I’m going to share some tips for choosing your managed hosting provider (which you can consider, obviously, along with talking to your friends and colleagues). Hopefully, this will help you in making a more educated decision.

In this post, let’s look at the scope of services provided.

Tip: Find out what is managed by the hosting provider

Managed hosting is loosely defined as having a provider manage some portion of your website hosting. So, for each provider you have to find out specifically what the hosting provider will manage vs. what you will manage. And beware of blanket statements such as “we manage everything”— they can be dangerous!

Here are some questions to ask a provider:

Standard Tasks

• Who manages the LAMP or .NET stack? (This tells you who will manage your Windows or Linux environment.)
• Who will manage the security patches and upgrades?
• Who manages the platform: hardware, network, OS, storage, database, DNS, firewall?
• Are clusters, redundancy and load balancers included in the package and who manages it?

Other Tasks

• Who manages backups of your site?
• Who will manage your applications: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.?
• Who will manage website security?
• Who will migrate the sites from my current hosting provider?

Always ask yourself what you want to manage. There are very few companies that will do all the standard and other tasks listed above, since typically the other tasks are site-specific and require customization for every site. Hence, they are time-consuming and risky for hosting providers and often not included in the package.

For example, Rackspace Cloud Sites is a managed cloud product that manages all the standard tasks listed above, but it’s the customer’s responsibility to manage the customer code, data and application. For a majority of people, this is all they need.

Once you’ve determined what your provider manages, you’ll want to evaluate quality of support provided, their availability and whether they can actually resolve problems in a timely manner. That’s the topic of Part Two: Getting Quality Support. Tune in next week.

Why is this important?

For non-tech entrepreneurs and small business owners: A lot of entrepreneurs, consultants and business owners who do not have a technology background have great ideas and want to start an online business. They want to build a website without having to set up a user, a database, ftp and the countless other things building a web business requires. The WordPress installer allows you to focus more on your online business and less on setting up a WordPress environment.

For web developers: Now you can spin up a WordPress site for testing and staging purposes in a matter of minutes without dealing with setting up environments and wasting time.

For web design companies: We understand our customers and we can truly become an extension of your team. We know that building a successful agency takes hard work, dedication and a desire to reach unimaginable heights of creative execution. And just like any business, getting more customers is always top of mind. But more customers lead to more sites to build. More sites involve installing your favorite Content Management System, WordPress, on your servers. A WordPress install typically takes 15 minutes for each client. Now, if you are a Cloud Sites customer, such as Southern Web Group, which hosts over 300 clients running WordPress sites, then you will have to install WordPress 300 times. That’s about 75 hours devoted solely to WordPress installs. Instead of spending time installing WordPress, you should focus on building beautiful websites for your clients. With our new WordPress installer on Cloud Sites, we give you back the time to focus on actually building the WordPress websites and blogs of your customers’ dreams and less time toiling with installations.

How to install WordPress on Cloud Sites using WordPress Installer?

1. Log in to the Cloud Sites Control Panel and click “Add A Site” and follow the on-screen instructions, as you would normally do to add a site on Cloud Sites.

2. When you get to the “Additional Features” section, select it and you’ll see a new “Applications” section allowing you to select a WordPress install.

3. Fill out the WordPress Configuration details.

4. Click “Finish” and you are done. You have successfully added a site and installed WordPress on Cloud Sites and at the same time.

Once WordPress is installed, your site will behave like any other site.

You may ask, why just WordPress and not other CMSs like Drupal and Joomla? WordPress is the most commonly used application on Rackspace Cloud Sites — roughly 25 percent of sites hosted on Cloud Sites are WordPress sites. We started with WordPress, and are working on Drupal and Joomla installers too. Stay tuned.

Give the new WordPress installer a try. And now that you’re no longer spending 15 minutes with each WordPress install, let us know what you think in our product feedback forum.

Here’s a video to walk you through using the WordPress installer for Cloud Sites:

For the latest information on WordPress installer, check out our Knowledge Center article.

Again, millions of the Apple faithful turned to gdgt’s live blog for photos and updates straight from the announcement, in which Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the mini me of iPads. The new iPad mini features a tight 7.9-inch screen and weighs just 0.68 pounds.

During the launch, gdgt, which is hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites, handled 4 million pages hits in just two hours. The graph below shows the traffic spike that gdgt experienced in that time frame.

Here are more details and numbers on the traffic that flowed through gdgt live blog:

• Total Traffic Served – Approximately 4 million page hits
• Peak Traffic – Approximately 2.2 million visitors in an hour
• Time Frame – Approximately two hours

The event ran so smoothly that Ryan Block of gdgt gave Rackspace a shout out on the gdgt Live Blog during the event:

How was gdgt able to handle the spike when other sites covering the event were down?
The gdgt live blog is hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. A week before the event, gdgt gave Rackspace a heads-up that it will experience a huge traffic spike. Rackspace and gdgt worked together to prepare for this kind of traffic. While gdgt ensures that its code is highly optimized, Rackspace ensures that we have all the infrastructure resources and that we follow our best practices for high traffic events. Here are some of the stats on infrastructure that was used:

• Number of web servers – 28
• Number of load balancers – five

Other gdgt and Apple Events

This is not the first time gdgt handled such a massive boost in traffic during an Apple product launch. Here are other gdgt high traffic events:

• gdgt handles 55 million hits during iPhone 5 launch
• gdgt handles 56 million hits during iPad launch
• gdgt handles 11 million hits during iPhone 4S launch

Power and Economics of Cloud

If gdgt had used a dedicated server it would have had to buy the infrastructure required to handle the solution i.e. 28 web servers and five load balancers.  That would be approx. $20,500 per month (taking a low-end server for $600 each and a load balancer for $650).

To power its live blog, gdgt users Rackspace Cloud Sites which costs just $150 per month. PERIOD. Cloud Sites includes all of the  Infrastructure (servers, load balancers, firewall, DNS, OS, DB, storage, network) resources and customers (such as gdgt in this case) DO NOT pay extra for it.

Once again, Cloud Sites helped gdgt be the go-to live blog for a major Apple announcement.

And gdgt isn’t alone; check out a few other high traffic events that Cloud Sites handled recently.

Want to know how you can handle high traffic events on Cloud Sites? Check out this Knowledge Center article for more info. And here are some best practices for optimizing your site on Rackspace Cloud Sites for a high traffic event.