Any experience with Rackspace?

T

the_servicer

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Is Rackspace a good company to work with? Its new owner is a private equity firm that also owns a whirlpool bath manufacturer, a producer of coated papers, cruise line operators, a plastic container supplier and various casinos in Nevada. Just wondering if anyone has used their services or has any opinion about the company's future, especially for someone who is now shopping around or considering "investing" important data or operations in Rackspace.
 
I can't say they have ever been a "bad" company to work with, their support is normally pretty good, its always been their pricing that turns me off from them. That said, last I heard they were working on better pricing.
 
Their "fanatical support" is quite good.

But they're expensive as all fuck and will GLADLY and DELIBERATELY sell you a completely under-spec server for top dollar.
Years ago, we'd outgrown the previous server we'd bought from them.
We'd been paying $600/month for something that was barely a jumped up workstation.
We got bumped to a dual processor machine (which was nice but not necessary), but wound up with only SLIGHTLY more disk space (2x160GB drives in RAID1) for $1000 a month after everything.
When we asked for something just with more disk space, they quoted us a $2500/month server that was complete CPU and memory overkill, but had a 4x360GB in RAID10.

And absolutely NO flexibility (they ARE more flexible now, but still ridiculously expensive).
I wanted to tell them to shove it up their ass and go drop a spec-bought box into a hosting center.
But my partners would then have expected me to admin it for free and on instant notice. Regardless of my job.

We're FINALLY moving off the thing, years late to a group of AWS servers.
The original box, because of how full it was, was basically downing the server every time Rackspace's online backup kicked in.
 
All i know is they are doing another round of massive layoffs.
 
RackSpace has always been stupid expensive. I used to rent servers from ServerBeach which got bought by Peer1 years ago. Their prices went up after that and I found a new datacenter to host my servers now.

I'd probably check into ServerBeach/Peer1. They were really good to me back in the day, just got too costly. Not RackSpace costly, but costly.
 
I use US Dedicated. Ive been hosting with them going on 4 years now. I went through 20 hosting companies prior. We used them for Hard Gaming Community as well and it was excellent.
 
Been using them since they purchased slicehost years ago. Only had one issue earlier last year - they apparently migrated machines and one of my vm's was borked. Recovered from an image, but it was a pain.
 
The two issues I ran into years ago were they were expensive, and if you change any of your services you may not get what you are paying for.

We had a system with them that had a hard drive go out, trashed the raid array. We lost all our data. We asked about backups. We hadn't paid them for backups. I said that is fine, lets get that going though so you all are doing the backups for us since this is a remote system, and our backup system doesn't have that capability. (This was early 2000s). I signed the new contract and thought all was good. Nine months later the system lost the raid array again. I called them up, found out the raid array was trashed again, and said lets replace the drives again, and restore our backup. At which point I found out that we were not being backed up. I asked why not. My contract says I am paying for backups. I was then informed that I never created a ticket for this server to be moved to the datacenter that could do backups. The datacenter I was in didn't have that capability. At which point I went through the roof.

I told them we were moving our service away from them, and that I wasn't paying the rest of the contract. They broke the contract by not providing the services we were contracted for, and no one ever questioning it on their side, so me not paying for the last three months of the contract wasn't going to break it since they didn't fulfill the provisions of the contract on their side.

The sales guy tried to argue, I stuck to my guns. Luckily I had been doing a zip and ftp of the application/data directory occasionally, so we didn't lose too much.
 
I use them for their hosted exchange. About 20 users or so. Easy to use, good support and pricing seems fine. But I don't pay the bills.
 
Used them for several years to host 12 big-bertha servers (quad 8-core 2.7 GHz Intel Xeons, 256GB RAM, Apex PCoIP cards, 2-digit-terabytes-worth of SSDs and 15k storage with fiber channel hookups) across 3 DCs (2 in US, 1 in Asia). I do not recommend Rackspace for mission critical operations; go use something like Faction (http://www.factioninc.com/) for this kind of stuff (and the price!)

-- worked as a corporate IT operative for an international manufacturing facility
 
We used to work with them for hosting and stuff and didn't had any major problems (usual are a norm in every business though) customer support was decent.
 
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