David Simpson

Introducing the Epicio Cloud!

Posted on June 5, 2010

Back in 2008, we were in the middle of launching one of our first substantial web design & development projects when.... kaputz, dead, no site to be found. After spending hours on the phone with our hosting provider of that time, cough...(GoDaddy)...cough, I about jumped out the window when we hadn't made any progress on getting the site back up. During the next few days we managed to get some the site recovered, but we lost a small amount of our files and had a complete database loss.

We didn't waste time, the next week we began talking with friends and colleagues to find out any helpful info about a reliable hosting company that we could partner with. In the weeks following we tried about a dozen different hosting providers before falling in love with Mosso, which later became known as The Rackspace Cloud in 2009. About 95% of web hosts today provide subpar uptime, well below their advertised 99.9% uptime. To put that into quick perspective think of it this way:

Downtime Scenario

If the average uptime with your current host is 99.7% (which it most likely is, maybe even worse to be honest) that rounds out to between 1:30-2:00 hours of downtime. Most hosting providers claim that their average downtime period is less than 5 minutes, so that could leave you with 20 or more periods of downtime in one month! Can you afford to have your website not available 20+ times a month when a prospective client visits? Didn't think so.

The Epicio Cloud Solution Package includes:

  • Rackspace Cloud Servers + Cloud Sites for Web Hosting
  • GoDaddy for easy and reliable Domain Name Management
  • Rackspace Cloud Files + Akamai for a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • CloudFlare for DNS acceleration + Content Delivery Network acceleration
  • SendGrid for a Cloud based email infrastructure

Ever since we made the switch in 2008 we have never been happier. Our comprehensive cloud solution is so easy, fast, and reliable to work with that it increases our productivity when working with both development and production sites. We have never looked back!** Our hosting uptime sits at 99.99% uptime for our hosting, and Rackspace guarantees 100% uptime for it's network availability.

Here are two frequent questions we get:

Question 1:
Why do you charge soooo much for hosting?!

Well, there are many good reasons that we charge considerably more than what you might see advertised online and in TV advertisements nowadays. The companies that offer unlimited everything for $1.99 month are not a company you ever want to trust or rely on. No company can provide you with unlimited computer resources and storage for $1.99/month, it is simply bad business. These companies get massive quantity of clients, make money and when it fails and they disappear with your money you'll never get a hold of them or find them. We have made a solid decision to partner with the most reputable companies in the world to provide a higher class of service to all, from the personal blogger to a mid-size corporation. It is because of this decision to provide a world-class solution with the all of the vendors we partner with that increases our cost significantly. We have slashed our profit margin because we believe that a business, school, non-profit of any size deserves the same high-class service that the large scale corporations have.

Question 2:
Why haven't you always advertised your cloud hosting solution?

This is a great question. The answer isn't overly complicated to that and plays into the previous question.

For those of you who are interested in learning more about the individual services, please see a general summary of each below. If you would like more details or just want to talk chat about cool cloud technology give us a call!

Overview of Services

An Overview of The Rackspace Cloud

Many of the new cloud hosting platforms require that you use custom code and architecture. Cloud Sites™ is designed to run your applications with very little (if any) modification. Cloud Sites is a powerful hosting platform built on existing web standards and powered by proven technology that you know, trust, and use regularly. You get the benefits of a scalable cloud platform without spending time coding custom APIs or data schemas. Whether you're looking to resell web hosting services, or manage dozens of your own websites, Cloud Sites™ gets you on the Cloud quickly, easily, and with lots of room to grow.

An Overview of CloudFlare

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

An Overview of Sendgrid

At SendGrid, we believe that the easiest and most effective method of communication a business has with its customers is email. **On average, 20% of emails sent by web applications either go missing or they get caught by spam filters.** What is the impact of a 20% loss in communication to your business?

SendGrid has developed a cloud based service that solves this challenge by delivering emails on behalf of companies. We've already helped over 8,000 companies and delivered over 2 Billion emails. Isn't it time that you can return your focus to the core of your business, and let our team take good care of your email?

Please visit our new website at http://theepiciocloud.com

Disclaimer: Though GoDaddy didn't work out to be a viable hosting solution for our company, they are an great domain manager, and we look forward to using that service from them long into the future.

The end

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