What is Rackspace Cloud?
The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include web application hosting or platform as a service ("Cloud Sites"), Cloud Storage ("Cloud Files"), virtual private server ("Cloud Servers"), load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.
Rackspace Cloud Files is useful for any WordPress owners to combine it with their WordPress Cloud Backup process. You can store each of your recurrent WordPress files backup and each of WordPress DB backup archive in your own cloud, inside your Rackspace Cloud account.
Why use Rackspace?
Scalable Cloud Object Storage
Cloud Files provides online object storage for files and media, delivering them globally at blazing speeds over a worldwide content delivery network (CDN). You can store as many files as you want—even very large files.
Our tightly integrated and easy-to-use CDN can distribute your public content—images, video, audio, and even HTML, JavaScript, and cascading style sheets—to hundreds of edge locations worldwide, so it’s close to your users. Less distance to travel means your users get your content faster.
Safe, Secure, and Tailored Backups: Automated solutions, stored in your own Cloud Files.
Rackspace Cloud Files Price
Simple per-GB pricing: First 1TB €0.0848/GB/Month
Prices are based on an aggregate total of storage and bandwidth for your account across all US regions.
Cost Estimation Calculator
Since, the price is in GB, each month, it a bit hard to understand the advantage. Let's take "big WordPress customer" and do an estimative calculation. Assume a database big enough to have a 1GB archive file PLUS 100 GB of files under the hood, inside WordPress. Hourly DB backups and daily full backup is an extreme approach, but let's crunch the numbers. Database: 1GB X 24 hours X 31 days = 744 GB/month. Files: 100GB X 31 days = 3100 GB/month. Both would be 3844 GB/month. Total Estimated Cost: €325.98 per 1 month for Cloud Files space.
Now, let's consider, that we don't need ALL the existing backups, just the last 7 from each (database and files). This means we need to delete existing archive files when we have old unwanted ones. Database: keep only last seven backups for each last 7 days (not the last 7 from last day), and delete the rest. Crunching the numbers for database: 744 GB/month - last 7GB = 737 GB/month. Same logic for files: 3100 GB/month - 700 GB = 2400 GB/month. Both would be 3137 GB/month. Total Estimated Cost: €266.02 per 1 month for Cloud Files space.
Now, let's consider, that somebody will crash the hosting server and erase everything, weekly. Then, you need to restore everything, weekly. If this happens to you, then consider switching immediately to owl power, as this is a borderline crazy scenario! Restoring would mean to download 5 times in a month a single database archive and a single file archive; always the last one, right before the server crash. Crunching the numbers for database: 1GB X 5 times = 5 GB/month PLUS for the files: 100 GB X 5 times = 500 GB/month would add up to a 505 GB extra Download cost. Your previous bill will jump from previous amounts to a whopping €51.36 just for Cloud Files restore, as extra Cost.
Total Cost for 1 Month is €317.38, at the end of this scenario. Kinda costly, right?
Secure Data Storage: Managed Restore process, exactly when you need it!
