SetupLinux

I’ve recently started using Rackspace for personal use.  For the Linux user this ROCKS!!  But if you need a Windows systems your SOL for now.

First of all “It’s cheap!!”.  This has to be the cheapest commercial (employs more than one guy in a basement) service I’ve used.  You can get a base system for about $11/mon.  That’s a full Linux system of your choice with 256MB RAM and about 10GB of storage.  Perfect for a web server, or other basic system.

Create a Server

To create a server you basically click on “Hosting” -> “Cloud Servers” -> “Add New Server”.   Select how much RAM you want (256MB to 16GB of RAM), give it a name and pick which Linux image you want to use.  Click “Add Cloud Server”, wait a couple minutes and your up and running.

Backup and Cloning

Some of the killer features on this service is their backup’s and cloning.  You have the option to enable backups, which makes a backup of the entire system and stores it on Rackspaces storage system.  You pay for the storage but it’s pretty cheap, I beleive it’s .15/GB or close to that.

When you setup your backup you get a drop-down list of times to do the daily backups, and another dropdown to choose what day for your weekly backup.  You can view your completed backups, and the killer feature is being able to make new servers based on one of those backup’s.  Very cool.

Summary

I’ve been using the service for 3 months or so now.  I’ve had 2 of the smaller 256MB systems that entire time and one of them doing nightly backup’s.  My bill has been $21-22/mon for the last 3 months, so it’s been very cheap.  Cheaper than some of the hosting services I’ve look at.

The weak points for me are lack of Windows servers (in beta now and coming soon), not being able to easily download backup images, and not being able to upload a server image.

Overall I like the service and would highly recommend it to somebody that wants a Linux server out there for cheap that’s reliable and has a good network connection.