Cloud Sites

EDITOR’S NOTE JULY 20, 2012: UPDATE: We have heard requests to extend the PHP 5.2 upgrade and are postponing this upgrade date for one month, moving from July 31 to August 31. PHP 5.2 was removed as a selectable technology option in June, and sites will be upgraded to PHP 5.3 beginning after August 31. Please ensure that your application or CMS solution is running the latest PHP 5.3 compatible version to avoid issues in this upgrade. We encourage users to validate that their sites are ready for PHP 5.3 prior to this upgrade in September. We will be contacting customers with test links to assist in this validation. Customers can manually upgrade sites to PHP 5.3 using the steps detailed in this article, but we encourage users to allow us to do the upgrade for you. Note that if you do the upgrade yourself, you will be unable to revert back to PHP 5.2.

The hosting landscape was rapidly evolving when Jonathan Bryace and Todd Morey started Cloud Sites. At the time, providers were looking at ways to provide discounted hosting, but didn’t offer a lot of advantages to the customer. Cloud Sites changed this by offering a robust platform.

Last month, we upgraded Rackspace Cloud Sites to new versions on PHP and .NET. Today, we are excited to announce that Rackspace Cloud Sites now supports MySQL 5.1.  Latest versions of all the software supported by Cloud Sites are available here.

Before, access to infrastructure may have held back smaller design shops, but that is no longer the case with the cloud. Cloud Sites is a powerful tool that can be used for larger applications and websites.

Prior to Cloud Sites, the founders had been working together for five years. The team built applications both for Rackspace and others, and they recognized that they needed to run somewhere. But after they built the app, the founders would have to sys admin the servers they ran on.

I recently joined the Cloud Sites team as a product marketing manager and have enjoyed working with such talented Rackers on defining the next version of the product. However, I also realize the importance of understanding the origin of a product as you look to carry it forward in the future. I was fortunate to get to sit down and visit with Jonathan Bryce and Todd Morey, the founders of Mosso (which would eventually become Cloud Sites).

During the recent launch of the latest version of the Apple iPad, Rackspace Cloud Sites customer gdgt.com handled more than 55 million requests and more than 110,000 concurrent connections in less than six hours.

Hosting over 400,000 sites across 112 countries, the Rackspace Cloud Sites product is the Platform-as-a-Service many advertising agencies and web design shops go to for creating sites that are stable, scalable and backed by support that is available in a moment’s notice.

When there are rumors of a new Apple product, the world waits with bated breath. Yesterday was no different as Apple, after wide speculation, announced the new iPad. gdgt, a Rackspace Cloud Sites customer, was able to support the big announcement without any hiccup whatsoever. While other blogs were cratering because of the massive amounts of traffic, the gdgt blog remained stable and fast, exemplifying the power of hosting at Rackspace.

When Apple makes big announcements, the tech world seems to stand still. Or rather, it’s tech workers’ productivity that slows to a crawl, as they seek out live blogs of those lucky enough to be in the room at 1 Infinite Loop.