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I have a website that receives heavy seasonal traffic. For much of the year, typical shared web hosting is adequate; however, the process of upgrading to VPS or dedicated hosting (when traffic gets too heavy) is quite arduous with my current host.

I'm looking at cloud hosting options like Rackspace and AWS, but I'm confused about how this works.

I'm used to administering my sites via cPanel, and I have my GMail configured to point to my web server and fetch mail. Sometimes, I require MySQL databases.

I would like all these features, plus easy (or automatic) scalability. Additionally, I don't want to pay $150/mo.

Is there a solution? Is cloud hosting the solution? How do I transition from a cPanel environment to a cloud hosting environment?

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Have you looked into something like Rackspace Cloud Sites? You pay based on utilization, and it automatically scales to meet your demand.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/sites/

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  • Yeah, but it's $150 per month. Shared hosting is around ten dollars a month -- and as I said before, it's adequate for much of the year. I'm wondering if Cloud Sites is, indeed, the correct solution... and this is a you-get-what-you-pay-for situation.
    – Peter
    Feb 8, 2013 at 18:38
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    I don't think you're going to get any automatic scaling on a $10/mo solution. You're probably just getting a chunk of disk space on a single server shared with 100 other websites, as I've seen plenty of resellers do. Feb 8, 2013 at 18:41
  • nearlyfreespeech.net kind of claim to.
    – sourcejedi
    Feb 8, 2013 at 20:49
  • They claim to offer metered hosting, but I see nothing about automatic scaling. @Peter - what kind of content are you hosting that brings your site down under heavy traffic? Is it just heavy multimedia that you could host on a CDN instead? Feb 8, 2013 at 21:01
  • Sorry, I spent too long editing my comment then gave up. NFS do claim to adapt to load. faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/nonmember/slashdot#slashdot Obviously if you're continually demanding more resource than a single server can provide, then "scaleable cloud" would be more appropriate buzzwords. But the question in hand seems to be more about "how do I scale between using (and paying for) 1% of a server, up to 100% of it".
    – sourcejedi
    Feb 9, 2013 at 10:13

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