I have been spending up to $120 a month or so on hosting for the past 6-8 years and I finally decided to get off my ass and make a change.

I have been with the same provider for the past 10 years and have always been happy with the service and performance but it was time for change. As you can tell by the frequency of my blog posts, I am not a high traffic site, so why am I paying as much as I am for hosting when I am a part time player? I am old school, so old school that I convinced a long time friend to build a server room, complete with a HFC-125 fire suppression system, large enough for 20x the space of the space in the old building they were moving from.For what? For control of the environment. To this day I don't feel that it was a bad investment, based on the business model. I am really just digressing on why I am so old school when it comes to hosting.

During my time at Gnoso, my eyes were opened to “the cloud”. The problem has always been that when it came to “the cloud”, Microsoft technologies were never represented in a fashion that it was worth my time to convert. I say this because I have a hard time spending 20, 40 or even more hours of my time to learn how I can move all of my stuff to save 500 bucks. In essence, I would be working for 10 bucks an hour.

I have always been impressed by the Rackspace “cloudsites” and have talked to friends about how they could implement solutions using the technology but I could never justify moving from a “real machine” to this “thing”. Then came Rackspace “Cloud Servers” for Windows.

Sometimes when I read, I implement the “Speed reader, crappy detail” parser and in the case of Cloud Servers, this was my original issue. I landed on the Windows beta page a few months back and for some reason thought I could sign up, so I did (sort of).

I got to the point in the signup process where you had to choose the o/s and I was confused why Windows was not an option. The next thing I did is what impressed me the most with Rackspace; I said screw it, and closed the browser and moved on with my day, so I thought. I started to receive these emails asking why I bailed, wondering if it was something they did wrong, and asking if I had any questions or needed help in completing my order. So what did I do? I replied to the email, never expecting a response. I told them that “Cloud Servers” are great, but Linux doesn’t pay my bills, contact me when I can make some money. Within a few hours, I was told that it would be coming soon (February 9th), and it came.

One of the other things I did a month or so ago was to “Add my contact information so we can inform you when the service is available.” We all know from experience that means that you can either expect a ton of spam, or someone is using you in a formula in their Excel spreadsheet in their “potential market” formulas that are given to investors. I had little to no hope of hearing anything about this “February 9th release date”. Well I was wrong. I received an email today and sent a tweet stating I was going to check it out tonight. Again, totally surprised, I receive a mention tweet saying “@joefeser awesome. would love to hear your feedback!”. And here is my feedback (do I digress or what?)

The first thing I did was click on the link provided in the “Cloud Sites Windows Beta” email from this morning. They added details from the original “beta” link, and added what is included today along with some things that not “ready” for prime time. Ok cool so on day one, you don’t have backup. It is beta, do we really expect your test to be backed up so your children can look it up on 10 years? For me no big deal, large scale operations may worry but it is beta for a reason, to verify it performs to expectations. They will not call it anything other than beta until the SLA is in place and they feel it is production ready. Thank you Rackspace for not calling something ready before it is ready.

So I click on a link or two or more to sign up, and I am confused because I don’t see a window link, I see a generic sales “funnel”, I continue anyway. I go though every page, and the required credit card with the required my home phone attached to it, and submitted the order. What was confusing is that it was not obvious that at this time, we need to collect data and nothing will be changed until you are approved and actually add a service. This is the only place that I found that needs work right off the bat. I can guess that the abandoned funnels show the same pattern.

Being that I am a .Net developer, I had faith that a beta has a ton of manual resources thrown at the problems that were not able to be resolved in html and they were. During the sign up process, it required a call back to my home phone number. Ross called me within 10 minutes to verify that I am who I say I am. I also asked a few questions and he was able answer them or email me a follow up with the answers - very impressive considering that up to this point, I have not committed a dime to them.

I was already in the control panel during the phone call and I decided to be the pain in the ass customer and set up the worst case scenario. Windows 2008 with 512 megs of ram running .net 3.5 sp1, IIS and Sql 2008 Express. Seriously, the setup should really just tell you, dude get a new job, Windows 2008 Server does not work with 512 megs of ram, but it does.

While relaxing with three Fat Tire beers, I was able to configure the server, open a few other ports on the fire wall, copy files from my old provider using remote desktop (from the cloud server), configure sql, IIS, set up permissions and send tweets updating my progress. During this time, the server experience was flawless. There were no pauses or trashing that you normally get from an underpowered machine. If a non sys admin like myself can enjoy a few beers while setting up a cloud server, somebody who knows how this all works should be able to nap during the install.

I have to say that I am totally impressed. I had very low expectations for a zero day, low resource install. The first swig of the beer cost more money than what was paid for the hosting of my Cloud Server during the install and config (8-12 cents).

My main wish is for a 768mb (6 cent per hour) option for Windows. My image wishes include having .net 3.5 sp1 installed along with the ASP.net MVC framework.

Check out the Cloud Servers for Windows information here along with the signup page here.

Great Job Rackspace.