Does anyone know how Rackspace cloud hosting for php files stacks up to a traditional dedicated server using litespeed?
Here it is: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/sites/
I'm thinking this +
In theory this setup seems simple enough but am I missing something here? I'm still running a few U.S. web campaigns and would also need to keep No Ip Fraud running. I'm not sure if I would run into any problems there? If there is an issue perhaps I can keep my mobile and ppv stuff separate.
If it ends up that I start running a lot of traffic in a certain country then I can always investigate other local options for maximum performance; but for initial testing it seems like this setup would offer the best "overall" performance. Am I missing something here or is this a reasonable setup?
if you don't have any fancy php script in your lander...
just change .php into .html
the rackspace files accepts STATIC websites...
you cant do php with cdn... Im assuming you have your file as php instead of html bc you actually want to use php...
rackspace does not support protocol relative paths. So it is a no go.
I love being able to just put in "//domain.com/lander.php" for both http and https
He's talking about Rackspace Cloud Hosting, not cloud files, which is automatically linked to their CDN.
Cloud Files == Amazon S3
Cloud Files CDN == CloudFront
Rackspace Cloud Hosting == Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Hosting is similar to Amazon EC2... they are just VPS servers 'in the cloud' i.e. in data centres owned by Rackspace.
Generally, the servers provided by Rackspace/Amazon are worse than what you will get from a private VPS provider for the same price - particularly the 'micro' instances offered. If you think these will offer you the best performance... you will be disappointed. Furthermore, the low tier Amazon/Rackspace instances are still expensive by VPS standards given what you get. But, they have granular billing.
These services are ideal if you want to scale to other data centres on demand and/or need a lot of scaling flexibility. If you don't need this, and you aren't very experienced with servers (or will hire someone), steer clear of these services...
In any case, services like DigitalOcean and Linode also offer granular billing, are a hell of a lot easier to work with and have many data centres.
TL;DR: The VPS offered by DigitalOcean and Linode are much better value and I would pick them over Amazon/Rackspace in a heartbeat.
Hey guys, thanks for the feedback; and thank you Zeno for the clarification and additional information. After reading Rackspace's website for some reason I thought that I could deliver my .php pages through the "cloud files" CDN; I didn't realize that "cloud hosting" was a different service.....
I'm used to using php for all of my LP's out of habit but from here on out I'll try to use .html if I can; at least for the mobile stuff....
If you don't have any PHP code in the landers you can just serve them from the CDN - you wouldn't need to change the extension to HTML if you don't want to.
Anyway, any PHP processing has to be done by a PHP handler, which runs on a server - CDNs don't do this, they are just static content serving machines.
There is a middle-ground called dynamic web acceleration - the cheapest service like this that I know of is CloudFlare's Railgun. Their normal service is basically a CDN that pulls content from your server rather than you having to upload it to the CDN first (basically uses the server as an origin/pull zone).
^^Everything Zeno said.
If you want genuinely global hosting of dynamic content (PHP etc), there is another option, which is Google App Engine. That's genuine global hosting from a single upload of dynamic content. However, it comes with a raft of disadvantages, from questionable spin-up time to a whole load of hidden problems (Google 'em, ironically enough) with implementation of apps. I tested it for AM a while ago and wouldn't recommend it - at least not unless you want to reimplement your tracking in Go.