September 09 was a good month for Thought Den. There were subtlemobs in the pipeline and igFest09 was still leaving a warm fuzzy aftertaste. But most importantly, there was the prospect for the company to invest in a brand new sexy server to host all our clever sites & games.

Back then, in the haze of Autumn we read-up on and whittled down a list of providers to choose from. Deciding strongly to not be swayed by the sexiest newest thang’ out there with ample blinding gizmos, BOGOFs to fill your boots with and then all backed with snazzy marketing.

And we picked the Rackspace Cloud Sites. Knowing them to be a solid provider, we were already using their services on the clever  Parashoot site and their offering is aimed directly at companies like ourselves.

Rackspace cloud sites logo

So 6 months down the line… what do we think now? Is the snazzy server still flying high or have we needed to clip it’s wings? Here’s out personal thoughts so far. Bad news first as always!

The Bad news: We’re thinking clippers because…
- Setting up FTP is a chore. An actual chore.

- No SSH. We can’t do nippy logins, scp our files to the server, no mass chmod’ing. But now there’s no chance to accidentally “recursively delete” a whole folder+contents in one swoop.

- After setting up a domain aliases like “thoughtden.com” to point at your “thoughtden.co.uk”. The .com won’t accept emails, unless you give in and just create a whole new site.

- Web access to PHPMyAdmin is trial and error! There’s about 50 different databases choices to log in to, and they’re labelled by number, not name…
Enter the username & password, select database number 1, click login. wait….. nope. Enter the username & password, select database number 2, click login, wait…. nope. Hmmm.

Good news: Flying high because….
- Blazingly quick to get started!

- Simple & clean interface THROUGH-OUT the site. Very easy to use & navigate. Very easy.

- Pretend FTP details to login into your site while you’re waiting for the DNS to point. Makes our development really easy.

- Support. It’s just like Rackspace’s Fanatical support. Always useful, always speedy.

- All our sites are running up to speed.

- Dan’s free T-shirt all the way from America for saying “hi” in a blog-post.

Dan looking a goon

Conclusion: Good far outweighs the Bad, it’s still Flying!

Almost 1000 people have registered to take part in Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project – and we’re having great fun being his technical support team. The project has featured in The Guardian, Grazia and the Evening Standard to name but a few… Our server almost crashed last night as hundreds of people attempted to download the 50MB audio file for London, but fear not because Rackspace Cloud Files

Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”

Subtlemob site

The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.

And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”