Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN

Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN is possible due to their capabilities.Frankly you can serve a full website from CDN. The method is not discovered by me but Jerry Schwartz of RackSpace, I have made it easier in this tutorial Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN, so that anyone can follow without doing anything using difficult API things.

Significance of Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN

The biggest possibility of this full method which we are going to describe in a digested way in this tut on Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN, is – frankly we can deliver our WordPress Cache from Rackspace Cloud Files CDN, instead of server using a to be developed plugin.

Prerequisites for Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN

Its better if you have Rackspace’s standard features for your existing website or rather Rackspace account (Cloud Sites, Cloud Server and Cloud Files). However, the minimum need is a Rackspace account with Cloud Sites (easier) or VPS (difficult) and obviously Rackspace Cloud Files CDN. However, only with Cloud Files its possible to follow this tut for Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN.

Steps for Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN

Easy Steps. Go to Rackspace Cloud login page and login. Go to Cloud Files :

The basic principle for Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN is/are :

• Either create a new container or use a new container (does not matter)
• Upload any HTML page
• Select that HTML page…

•  …add POST meta data like X-Container-Meta-Web-Index for index.html in our example. To add meta data simply click the plus sign and a pop up will come :

 
Update on August 1st, 2013 : There is no need to add any header anymore. By default HTML webpages are now served as HTML webpages.
 

Fill the fields and save it. Thats it. In our case, I did basically copy pasted and saved the source code of our website’s home page as html file. It is actually available here :

http://c812286.r86.cf2.rackcdn.com/index.html

No normal human will love to see this big url of CDN. That is very easy to solve. There are two ways to solve. One is .htaccess on an existing website and second one is using CNAME. That is what we basically did in Host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox tutorial.

Advanced usages

But unlike that Host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox tutorial, we will actually add only the CDN url part as CNAME not towards the file. This will give us for example, http://nonexistent.thecustomizewindows.com like CDN served site.

.htaccess part is actually like we do (basically cache plugins do) to serve a static HTML page from cache folder without any change in URL.

But again, for a full website, Serving Full HTML Website From Rackspace Cloud Files CDN will never be practical if we do not create subdirectories / sub folders. Do not worry, that is very easy. A freeware named CyberDuck can do it efficiently with a GUI.