Rackspace Cloud Server boldly comes in two flavors apart from Rackspace Cloud Sites. Which one will suit you – Managed or Unmanaged Rackspace Cloud Server ? The cost of managed is $100 / month extra, but there is also other charges for Managed Rackspace Cloud Server. To make your decision easier, as a long term user we are presenting you some idea to select from Managed or Unmanaged Rackspace Cloud Server. There are other Public Cloud Services for Hosting, but we are not considering them as most are more costly and targeted for Enterprise.
Rackspace Cloud Server : When to Use Managed Server
Managed Rackspace Cloud Server is always the best solution. But, the price becomes double for per hourly charge for server plus the $100 / month for the managed level plus if you use other services. Usually two 1 GB server setup plus one memcache server is enough as basically we use database as a service now. Cost approximately will be minimum $250 – $300 per month. It is our rough calculation. Please use the official websites chart to check it.
There are dozens of discussions on the Internet on Cloud Computing and Cloud Hosting; most are however fully useless news type posts, we must say that the subject Managed is still obscure to most of our visitors. So this part of this article is dedicated simply to understand what a managed server is and why the providers, companies and professionals continue to recommend it.
With the word Managed, it refers to a plan which is fully managed. It is used because these systems are bare, that is where you installed the operating system, with or without any control panel you hardly do the software installation, updates and Maintaining Your System. But a 24 hours monitoring is never possible without a managed level.
It is better to use the Managed Rackspace Cloud Server for serious website hosting where there is the way to earn money. Basically Rackspace has the best possible support. And honestly their knowledge of UNIX is not comparable what number of tutorial we write using unmanaged. Its a practical day to day work for them.
Rackspace Cloud Server : When to Use Unmanaged Server
Unmanaged Rackspace Cloud Server is very cost saving. It can be a good point to start with. We basically use Unmanaged Rackspace Cloud Server for creating tutorials and when you will need a huge resource like 2 x 30 GB servers for non public usage, then its better to use Unmanaged. It is good to test, run lighter sites, applications, as remote desktop etc. Cost is less than 1/10th to start with versus managed.
Rackspace Cloud Sites : Compromised yet the most powerful and cost saving
If you use any CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Magento etc. and the usage is like having huge number of domains but pageviews per website is less than 2 million pageviews per day for one site, you need no SSL (Cloud Sites has SSL, but its better to use Cloud Server for SSL), partially managed; its basically Application PaaS or aPaaS. You will not get the root / SSH access. Its $150 per month. This Rackspace Cloud Sites is possibly the most popular. There are some minor glitches. But we personally think, if you can not afford Managed Rackspace Cloud Server, Rackspace Cloud Sites is the best option, as you will get the full support for server side. Unofficially minor questions for Unmanaged is free (that often happens with us as we create the tutorials and destroy as soon as possible). Basically you can run the Bash scripts for needed commands. There is cron too. But there is now no support for Ruby. Those among us are ‘persistent’ client, we are still getting Ruby. (There was an issue in comment for one tutorial). After a time you will possibly need to upgrade to Managed Rackspace Cloud Server. The control panel of Rackspace Cloud Sites is the best, unfortunately you have to use Plesk for Managed Rackspace Cloud Server. Its a kind of downgrade to me personally.
Basically, for Managed, practically there is no need to login to control panel after initial 1-2 months. My reasons to login is to create an unmanaged server or tutorial, read their sent ticket for some update notice, creating Subdomain, database to test software, sometimes my Bank plus Mastercard creates an issue with transaction. That is one reason to login. Another reason is to increase the domain registration.
