Rackspace: Worthy of their hype
 

I'm just curious what the thoughts are on Rackspace. They claim fanatical support. Is it really better than other managed providers, especially for the price difference?

Also, talking to one of their reps, they claim that the servers housed in their DC's never exceed 30% of total capacity, ensuring that even if they lose multiple Internet pipes, their customers will still run at full capacity. Is this actually true?

Just curious what your thoughts are on Rackspace vs. other managed providers.

Rackspace is good, however, they are very overpriced in comparision to the rest of the market. Definitely do some shopping. Many DC's offer redudent HSRP, all you have to do is look at their network map. What servers specs were you looking at with them?

Good luck

Slightly biased, as I work for another Managed Hosting Company.

From the customers that have migrated to us from Rackspace, they have not had the greatest levels of support in comparison to what they were paying. We've also been advised that they are relatively inflexible to your real needs - somewhat "Oh, that’s not part of our standard offering... well, we can't really do that/ support that, you're on your own" as opposed to "Hmm... we've not worked with that before. Let's see if we can use our collective knowledge to provide you with the solution which best fits your requirements".

As say, this is just the feedback that I have received from customers that have moved away from them, not necessarily how they treat all of their customers.

I'd also ask to look deeper into the 30% capacity claim. Is that based on CDR's, or is that based on day to day usage etc..

We've experienced a mixed bag on support to date. In some cases, we received the "we don't do that" answer. One area I was surprised at, was that we were asking for some help on setting up some perfmon or other tracking to see how our server (2k3/IIS) scaled and performed as we added users, and they just sent us links to some sites about setting up perfmon.

On the other hand, in other areas, they have been very aggressive in their support. Very often, if there is any question about the support ticket or if we need to make a decision, rather than just updating the ticket, they make a phone call to us to ask what we want to do.

We made a rush decision, because we needed a European DC with English support and wanted it to be a company with a good rep. Most of the companies I read good feedback on had US DC's.

Indeed, their outages this summer have been massive. They also claim that it was only a single data centre, however they must have some central DNS management going on from that facility, as many sites were fully offline due to non responsive name servers!

Rackspace they r a leading hosting/cloud provider in the industry and they deliver for what you pay.

But they r a bit expensive. Your decision will not be wrong if you choose them:)

The Rackspace cloud is technically similar to a standard vps rather than a centralized storage.

So in case of an outage or disaster your Rackspace cloud cannot be brought back or replicated on another node. So its a bit risky too. So its better you analyze the technology of your cloud provider before you make a buy!:)