What Are Cloud Sites?

Firstly, you can see what Cloud Sites are, and all about them, direct from the source, from Rackspace. Here is a link to their Cloud Site's page. But, in a nutshell, how would I explain them? Firstly, they are easy to use, just like consumer and small business hosting packages from places like Godaddy, Bluehost, et. al. are. It literally just takes a few minutes to set up a domain and have it go live. And like those solutions, all of the underlining technologies are completely managed for you. Here's what's different: Commonly in "Managed Shared Host" environments, you are going to be one site along with many hundreds of others crammed onto one single server within the Data Center. Cloud Sites is different. It uses Cloud technology to automatically expand your hosting resources as it detects the amount of traffic that your are receiving, in real time. What it comes down to is that a ton of traffic won't bring your site down. Normally, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars per month for that kind of reliability and performance. So here comes the efficiency advantage of the Cloud: If you have a sudden spike in traffic, for whatever reason, your site won't go down, and if it causes you to have an overage charge, the price is very fair (2¢ per Compute Cycle and 50¢ per GB of Bandwidth), and more importantly, it allows you to only pay for what you use. This creates a lot of value. Let me give you an example: I'm a big fan of Leo Laporte and his TWiT.tv network. Most of his "Netcasts" have a live audience of a couple thousand, and a download audience in the hundreds of thousands. I cannot tell you how many times he has mentioned what he thought was an interesting site, and then most of his live viewers try to go immediately to the mentioned site. And it breaks. It goes down. And that's simply from about a thousand people all trying to go there at once. What an opportunity lost! But with Cloud Sites, under that kind of scenario, the site won't crash. Special javascripts within the datacenter will detect that the domain is receiving increased traffic and will automatically increase the resources (bandwidth, compute cycles) devoted to that site. That's the beauty of it, and that's one main reason Cloud Sites has such value.


So What am I Doing? What am I Offering?

If you are a webmaster for a lot of websites and you are interested in using Cloud Sites, then buying your own Cloud Site directly from Rackspace would probably be your best option. That's because if you purchase a $150/mo Cloud Site, it gives you the feature of having as many "Clients" or what they are calling now "Sub Accounts" on it, as well as host as many domains on it, as you need or would like. And if you are a webmaster, your probably getting paid enough by your own clients to make it worth it. Or, even if you only have one site, but it's a huge site in terms of traffic, a popular news blog, for instance, that gets hundreds of thousands, millions of hits per month, then going direct, is definitely worth it.

What I'm doing is selling these "Sub Accounts" for those, like myself, who have sites and Wordpress blogs and such, that we'd love to have such huge traffic volumes, but we don't right now. And so, if you have one or a few domains like that, of your own, and you would like the benefit of Cloud Sites, the ability to host on this resource without having to pay $150/mo, that's where I come in. Because whether you have your own Cloud Site, or have a Sub Account that you are subscribing to through me, all domains on Cloud Sites are treated equally as far as power and performance. The only thing that is different is the amount of resources. So you get the benefit of using Cloud Sites at a much smaller price, but with the assurance of knowing that if you do have a sudden spike in traffic, your site won't go down. Or lets say you have a site that has a relatively small amount of traffic but is steadily growing. You still know that it won't go down, and that at any time in the future, you could get your own Cloud Site, if it gets to that point. What I'm offering is a way to use Cloud Sites, which I feel is a superior product than the average "Managed Shared Host," at a price more in line with those services. That's the jist of it. Pretty simple. But if you have any other questions, I'd love to hear from you.