Support

I'll have to repeat myself like a broken record. RackSpace said the old API would be retired mid-November 2014. We had no problem with the old API. After RackSpace's stern warning that the old API is being retired we switched to the new API. The new API is unreliable. Most of the times it DOES work. Sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't it usually takes hours to days to get back in working order.

The thing is that you can't know which API version a software uses just by looking at what works and what doesn't. Whether the new API works or not is a factor of many things such as where your account was created, which geographical area the client is currently in, the time of day and presumably the phase of the moon or something. Having one server in Dallas, USA running Akeeba Backup and one Mac in Athens, Greece running CyberDuck (also using the new API) trying to upload files to the same RackSpace CloudFiles account we observed on different days and times of the day that:

• Both were working (70% of the time)
• CyberDuck in Athens was working a bit slowly, Akeeba Backup in Dallas was not working
• CyberDuck in Athens was not working, Akeeba Backup in Dallas was working a bit slowly
• Both were not working

Which means that using RackSpace CloudFiles with the new API is a crapshot. Most of the times there's no problem. But when there IS a problem you're completely hosed.

All I can suggest is try to create a new bucket in the London geographic area (which is what I used for my tests) and if the transfer fails keep on trying every day for the next 20 or so days. At some point you'll see it works and from then on it will be working until the service becomes congested again and starts failing all the same.

And I have to repeat myself yet again. We DO use the RackSpace API published by RackSpace. We DID confirm that we are not doing anything stupid by checking it against the implementation of a known good software (CyberDuck) which does let us manage RackSpace CloudFiles. The problem is not on our site. The problem sits squarely on RackSpace's pathetic implementation. Namely, their authentication server has severe reliability issues.

CloudFiles is a files storage service. It's not a CDN. A CDN has edge nodes around the world aiming for fast delivery of already uploaded content. It's like Amazon S3 and CloudFront: you upload the files to S3, they get delivered everywhere around the world lightning fast (and a tad more expensive) via CloudFront.

Regarding storage costs, S3 and CloudFiles have the same cost. In fact, last time I checked (in November) CloudFiles was a wee bit more expensive, but we're talking about one cent of a dollar or so per Gb for the first few Gb of storage used. In the end of the day it translated to less than a dollar per year, so who cares really? But yeah, their cost calculation form IS complicated. It's designed for large companies with Terabytes of data to store, Petabytes of data to deliver and hundreds of servers to run. For small companies like ours that form is a serious overkill. Better look up their price list, it's more straightforward!