Rackspace Step 1: Creating an account

I started to migrate all my sites to rackspace today. I've been a netnation user for many years and it has come to the point where they couldn't support want I wanted to do. I need to build some RESTful APIs and needed access to some of the server configuration files... after a number of support calls they said they couldn't do what I wanted.

I already have a number of clients who I've moved over to rackspace so it was time to do the same for myself. This process took a while for I needed to move a couple more clients off my netnation instances and clean up some old blogs that I wanted to keep around. All that is done, so I begin the move. 
A great way to get started with creating a cloud server is to watch this introductory video; 



The features that stood out for me from this introductory video is how you can do the following with a rackspace cloud server;

1. create a new server instance from a backup, allowing you to create a "template" image that you can use for subsequent cloud servers.
2. the ability to rescue a server from another server instance by mounting the "damaged" servers file system.
3. rebuild a server by restoring it from a backup without losing the servers existing IP address.

Rackspace android app

An important issue came up right off the start. I had set up a client using my preferred username and after contacting rackspace support told me I couldn't change the primary username for a rackspace account. I should have known better. A lesson well learned, never use a personal login name for a client. In the end its all for the better for I am going to use another preferred username and make it more robust by putting leets in both my username and password. A more secure solution.

After completing my account setup I created an API Key so I could access my rackspace instance from my android phone. This is a nice feature that would allow me to either soft or hard reboot the server, allow me to resize a server (most likely due to performance needs) or delete the server completely. I'm looking forward to more features becoming available with the android app; the ability to backup and recover. After that a nice ssh app for the android and all would be good...