A little history
Cloudsites started a service called Mosso, it had some connection with Rackspace, but not a controlling interest as we're aware of. It was great because it supported a number of web technologies without having to manage a VPS or anything else. You could run:
- PHP
- ASP
- PERL
- Python
- Ruby
- Others???
The Transition to Rackspace
Eventually this scrappy startup matured and was brought into Racksapce proper, which was a welcome change in some ways, but we found the innovation and growth started to wane. At one point during Cloud Sites tenure at Rackspace it became unusable for MODX based sites. We transitioned many of our sites to dedicated servers to maintain uptime and reliability.
Cloudsites on Liquid Web 1 Year In
We were apprehensive about this transition, and it was not without hurdles, however it's been a good move and here is why.
Focus
We've seen increased focus on the product after it being neglected for years. For us this is very important, you don't want to be tied to a technology with no future. As of now, we feel confident in Cloud Sites long term viability, continued growth and improvement. We experimented with putting some heavier and heavier MODX websites on Cloud Sites in the last few years and it's been more and more stable. We're in the process of transitioning many of our sites back to Cloud Sites which should save us a considerable amount on dedicated server hosting.
Updates
Some of the improvements we've seen:
- Rolling out of PHP 7, PHP 7.1 and now PHP 7.2
- The options for MariaDB
- Continued Microsoft .NET support... if you're into that sort of thing.
- 1 click Installs for many popular apps such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki and more
- SNI support in Cloud Sites
- Let's Encrypt Support - Coming Early 2019
The Let's Encrypt Support is arguably the biggest change we see coming that we are most excited for.