Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Building my home base on rackspace

I'm moving all my domains over to rackspace and will firmly establish them as my home base. The sites include the following;
  • rawsthorne.org - this is my personal site and will be used to host my personal profile and all published content and links for my Open PhD
  • endeavours.com - eventually this will host the site for the massively collaborative assessment system (or some other domain name, TBD)
  • bit.bc.ca - Bowen Institute of Technology, this will be the instance pointing at the blended learning / community of practice site where people can work toward of becoming a Solutions Architect / Learning Systems Architect.
Why the move away from netnation for my hosting? For a few reasons;
  1. Cost. Cumulatively netnation costs me about $400 per year, I believe I will have my dedicated cloud server for about $100 per year to start.
  2. Features. I was building some PhP/MySQL software a while back and I ran into challenges in altering the .hosts file to support a RESTful API I was building. Even after contacting netnations technical support they couldn't help me. I ended up using rackspace, their support was awesome.
  3. Cloud based servers. I firmly believe in cloud based approaches and if I can host multiple sites with the ability to expand for close to $100 per year, why wouldn't I move.
Honestly, I really don't think netnation will mind that I move. I exhausted the discussion with the features I required. The features I required are to enable a RESTful API with a specific domain name. It requires some customizations to configuration files at the server level. Netnation were not willing to support the customizations I was requesting.