Where can I find your AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) ?

You can find a copy of our AUP, TOS, and SLA on our website.

Can I host adult content sites on The Rackspace Cloud?

Please refer to our Acceptable Use Policy for details on what content can be hosted with us. You can find a copy of our AUP on our website.

Can I use Cloud Sites as an audio or video encoder?

The Rackspace Cloud isn't afraid of the facts. And the fact is, audio and video encoding is a good example of a task that a Cloud Server is better suited for. We built Cloud Sites to be a highly specialized and optimized computer cluster for serving web content. That means it's not really designed for audio processing, video processing or streaming tasks. It's okay to have some audio or video content on Cloud Sites (if you own the copyrights, of course), but it's not meant to be a processing farm for audio conversion, video conversion or a Shoutcast system to use for live audio streaming. Check out FFMPeg on Cloud Servers

Are there any limits on how many times I can check my mail?

There are no limits on the number of POP3/IMAP checks you can make on a per hour or per domain basis. There is a limit on the number of open concurrent connects that you can have open on a single email account. You can have a maximum of 16 concurrent connections open at one time. Typically, a mail client such as Outlook or Mac Mail will use 4 connections each. This means that you may have 4 different mail applications simultaneously checking the same email account.

Will The Rackspace Cloud ever suspend my site if it receives tons of visitors?

The Rackspace Cloud will never suspend a site as long as the traffic is legitimate and the hosted content doesn't violate our TOS or our AUP. As a company, we succeed when you succeed so we will always encourage legitimate traffic to your sites. We have several domains on Cloud Sites that receive millions of hits each month. We have never limited or throttled their accounts, as that is one of the many benefits of going with a Cloud offering like The Rackspace Cloud Sites service. On the other hand, we will stop any illegitimate spikes in traffic, such as, runaway scripts or DDOS attacks, etc.

What does The Rackspace Cloud use for a storage system? Have you done anything there to make it redundant?

Nothing as important as your website should be served from a single hard drive, but you'd be surprised by how many web hosts have little more redundancy than a pair of crossed fingers. We're different - and for good reason.

The advanced architecture powering our hosting solution uses groups of high-performance, network-attached storage devices to reliably serve every web page, image, and email. Inside each storage device, drives are mirrored to each other in a RAID configuration to create a first level of redundancy. And, as a final precautionary measure, all data on the system is automatically backed up on a repeating schedule.

How often does The Rackspace Cloud backup information?

The entire Cloud Sites FTP structure is backed up every four hours, which totals six daily backups. Those backups are rolled into a nightly backup, which are retained for two days. However, these backups are for disaster recovery on the server side. If for any reason a storage node on our side were to crash, our backups will be there to replace any lost data.

That said, we recommend that you make periodic backups of your site and data to your local computer since we are unable to extract an individual site's data from the nightly backups. If you need a backup of your MySQL or MS SQL databases, they can be exported through our online utilities (MySQL or MS SQL) or by connecting directly to the servers using desktop software.

What version of Linux does Cloud Sites run? What about for Windows?

The Linux side of our platform is built on Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Red Hat Enterprise Server. On the other side of the fence, the Windows platform runs on Windows 2008 and IIS 7. You can find a list Linux and Windows technologies by clicking here.

I've had shell access (SSH) in the past. Why isn't it offered on Cloud Sites?

Shell access (also commonly known as SSH access) is not offered on Cloud Sites, primarily for security reasons. Keep in mind, however, that many functions typically accessed via shell are available on The Rackspace Cloud, including cron jobs, file permissions, and unzip. You can also do many SSH type functions by mounting your FTP location locally using SSHFS. More information can be found here.

Finally, if full shell access is required, check out our Cloud Servers offering.

What is included for $150?

We have included enough resources in the Cloud Sites base package to power most business needs. You get 50GB of high performance storage as well as 500GB of bandwidth per month. In addition, Cloud Sites uses compute cycles to monitor your computing usage. You get 10,000 compute cycles per month across all your sites and applications. Unlike many hosting companies, The Rackspace Cloud will never cut you off for using what we sell you.

What happens if I exceed the included amount?

While most customers will fall well below the included amount, we have created fair and simple pricing beyond the base amount that means you pay ONLY for what you use and nothing more. There are no onerous penalties for exceeding the included plan amounts. The prices for all scaling metrics can be found on the Cloud Sites Pricing Page.

How far can I really scale?

We currently have users pushing hundreds of millions of requests on single domains. There are many factors that impact how easily a web application can scale, including the application’s code and its architecture. Rackers are ready to review your web application/solution and provide guidance on how to optimize it for Cloud Sites. If an application is not properly built for scale, Cloud Sites will not be able to compensate for it.

Also, if you are expecting a massive surge in traffic (perhaps your site was featured on Oprah) please contact us via chat, phone, or ticket in advance and we will help you prepare for it. The information we will need can be at the end of the How do I optimize my website? article.

What are compute cycles?

Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on The Rackspace Cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

How many compute cycles will my applications use?

Since web applications vary so greatly, it's hard to make a perfect guess. There are, however, some guidelines that can help. For example, 10,000 compute cycles would power approximately:

• 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system
• 11 million page views of rackspacecloud.com
• 25 million requests for a static 15KB image

How do I track my compute cycle usage?

The compute cycles you use are presented in your control panel in near real time.

What goes in to calculating a compute cycle?

Mostly, CPU processing time. However, compute cycles also account for the disk I/O your application's operations consume. For example, a page with heavy database queries will consume more compute cycles in part due to the larger volume of disk I/O it requires.

How can I implement an e-commerce site?

While Cloud Sites is not designed for credit card storage and is not PCI compliant, it can be used as a flexible front-end to a payment gateway.  For more information, see our article on utilizing Cloud Sites in an e-commerce solution.

I was allowed to enable web analytics, but am no longer able to.  What happened?