Mod Deflate on Cloud Sites

I am using Could Sites to host a few web sites, and have been using the Apache Module mod_deflate to compress HTML, Javascript and CSS before being sent to the web browser. I am getting closer and closer to my compute cycle limit, but I still have plenty of bandwidth to spare each month, so I am considering turning off mod_deflate; potentially wasting some bandwidth, but hopefully reducing my compute cycles.

Support couldn't give me any indication of the potential compute cycle savings.

I am starting to become a little suspicious of the compute cycles, it is an unknown measurement, and there seems to be very little documentation on the Rackspace web site about how it are calculated. In the Control Panel, there is no breakdown by hour, or even day, of this usage, and Rackspace simply say the 10000 cycles are "about the same processing power as you'd get from a decent dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance" - this seems pretty vague to me!

Windows Server on Rackspace Cloud

After a quick chat with Rackspace this morning, they are now saying Windows Server should go live on Cloud Servers by the end of the year.

Rackspace Cloud Sites is down

Just discovered that my sites hosted with Rackspace on Cloud Sites are all down.

A live chat with Trey in support confirmed this, but he didn't have any more information :-( There is little / no information on the status page. He did say some other clusters were affected, but my sites couldn't be moved to a working cluster. So much for reliability!?

All my web sites on Cloud Sites are showing "Please come back later."

Argh!

DNS without NS?

The Rackspace Cloud DNS management tool allows A, CNAME and MX, but unfortunately no NS records :-(

Had a chat with Charles via Live Chat, who helpfully offered to add any NS records I need. I asked if this was a planned addition to the DNS management, he seemed to think so, but he couldn't give me any indication of timescales.

Getting a couple of Rackspace cloud servers is an option and running my own DNS, or maybe DNS Made Easy, as recommended by Slicehost. I notice Slicehost are now a Rackspace subsidiary.

Email problem with subdomains

First issue that support have been unable to assist with :-( It seems you cannot configure email addresses on subdomains.

The error message is:

Subdomains such as uk.domain.com cannot be used in email addresses, so the accounts listed here belong to domain.com. 

So, if you have different offices around Europe, and use email addresses at uk.domain.com, de.domain.com, fr.domain.com, you cannot continue this on Cloud Sites :-(

Support were polite and friendly, but unable to offer a solution. I cannot see a technical reason why this isn't possible, and I guess I could setup a Cloud Server to work around this problem, though at additional cost.

I wonder if this is a problem for people that register domains like domain.uk.com or domian.gb.com through non accredited ICANN domain registries.

Back to Rack

I first signed up an account with Mosso to test their Cloud Sites service in July 2008. I didn't even get to the end of the free 30 day trial before I cancelled. The control panel was soooooo slow and unresponsive, I had problems with a long subdomain, that during testing a Mosso engineer deleted by accident along with all of the content I had uploaded - fortunately I had a backup. Day 6, I quit and went back to my Debian VPS kindly hosted on a friends dedicated Rackspace server.

So, here I am, one year later, and I'm back with Mosso, or, after its reband, the Rackspace Cloud.