Over the last two days we’ve moved our Clipish Library from serving the files locally on our web server to Rackspace’s Cloud Files service. It is similar to Amazon S3, however since we were already using Rackspace Cloud Servers, we thought it would be easier to just keep it all under the same roof. The actual changes in code for using Cloud Files only took about 2 hours, but I had to write a script to loop through our entire library and populate Cloud Files with our current library. What is great is in the future when we add items, our code will automatically add files to Cloud Files via their API. Here is our network graph after switching (Item #3):
As you can see by the number 3, it was a pretty big difference when it came to serving all those files. What also is great is now our content isn’t just hosted by Cloud Files, but is using the Limelight’s CDN with just a single click (or api command). So now for our iPhone users, it will pull the image from a server close to them, which can make a big difference with these mobile devices and their 3g/edge connections. (Item #1 shows a short time where our server had a misconfiguration and was throttling bandwidth. Item #2 was where we disabled a cracked application shortly to see just how much bandwidth, which I’ll post about later.)
So far I would have to say I recommend using Cloud Files from Rackspace. The pricing is pretty good and competitive, and the service as a whole is very, very straight forward. Another great thing is they provide a PHP library (sample code), as well as several other language libraries, to access Cloud Files. It was very easy to implement, and the speed of the API was phenomenal. Overall, its just a great product that works as advertised, and you have access to the great support staff at Rackspace Cloud.
Justin Carmony 