Deploy a dedicated server in the cloud *

A credit card
Some pocket change to spare
A sense of adventure

With RackspaceCloud, setting up a dedicated cloud server has become easy and affordable, even for freelancers working on shoestring budgets. Not everybody wants or needs a dedicated server, and managing one can be a time consuming task. Good old virtual hosting with your regular hosting company may be working out just fine for you. But if having your own server in the cloud sounds appealing, here’s a quick rundown of what you can expect.

RackSpaceCloud allows you to create virtual servers in a variety of configurations. The base configuration includes:

Server Sizes
Configure your server appropriately. Prices vary based on memory and disk space.

64 bit architecture
250 MB of RAM
10GB hard drive
1 Internet facing ethernet card assigned a dedicated IP address.
1 internal facing ethernet card assigned a private IP address
Base install of the Linux distribution of your choice — Fedora, Centos, Ubuntu, even Redhat Enterprise.
Accessible via SSH at its dedicated IP address
Total time to get the server up and running: About 1 minute.
Cost to run the server: 1.5 cents per hour, or a little over $10 per month

Available Operating Systems
What flavour of Linux do you prefer? Make your choice.

You may be thinking that 250MB RAM and 10GB of disk space is an impossibly small configuration, but keep in mind that you’re dealing with a headless server (no GUI), that will probably only host a handful of Websites. Compare that to your standard hosting setup, where you may be sharing a server with hundreds of other Websites. My own domain, glort.com, for example, was one of 730 sites hosted on its server. That server had 2 GB of RAM and 160 GB of disk space. That works out to about 2 MB of RAM per site, with the default disk space available to each site set at 50 MB. (Want to know how many sites are hosted with yours? Use the tool at YouGetSignal.) Anyway, you get the picture. 250MB RAM and 10GB disk space will provide lightning fast Web server responsiveness for many hosted sites. Besides, your cloud server is instantly scalable. For example, you could upgrade the RAM to 1 GB and dsk space to 40 GB, with one mouse click. Keep in mind, however, that your costs will increase for as long as the scaled-up configuration is working — to 6 cents an hour in the case I just described.

Deploying the server in its base configuration is a snap, and is as simple as signing up for the service and clicking a couple of buttons. What comes next is a little more difficult, and not for everyone. Your brand new server is a base install of Linux. That means Apache, PHP, MySQL, and everything else you need to run a Web server, are not yet installed. You have access to the machine via SSH only. In other words, no GUI… just a text console. You’ll need to install all the software you require manually, configure it with a text editor, and get it up and running. You’ll also need to set up the DNS A and CNAME records for any domains you host on the system. Not everyone wants to tackle that kind of job.

In contrast, to be fair, Amazon EC2 offers a wide variety of server configurations include a full LAMP Stack on Fedora, GlassFish application server, and a variety of Windows server configurations. The price tag is a little steeper (10 cents per hour for the Fedora Linux installs, with a base configuration of 1.7 GB RAM and 160 GB disk space), but if you need the stack pre-installed, this may be the way to go. DNS in Amazon EC2 is a little tougher than at Rackspace, since they don’t offer authoritative DNS for domains hosted on server instances… you’ll either need to setup your own DNS servers or use a third party for the service.

Control Panel
Deploying your Cloud Server takes just a couple of mouse clicks.

RackspaceCloud comes with a nice control panel that allows you to create a server instance with the click of a button. The server can be terminated just as easily, and in part two of this series I’ll walk through the process of creating a cloud server and installing/configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP… the basics required for most web developers.

* I suppose a better title might have been “Deploy a dedicated server in A cloud”. There is no “The” cloud. Many companies offer access to their own cloud services, and many organizations are deploying internal clouds.