Our prayers have been answered! No longer do we need our own servers, staff, bandwidth, or anything else.

Rackspace is coming out with "The Hosting System" which for $89 they will host unlimited sites, bill our customers, AND support them! Isn't this the best stupid idea ever?

Hope they won't mind us transferring our 3500 clients over to their system for them to host and support for the whopping $89/month!

http://thesystembeatstheserver.com/

I'm sure the server has a bandwidth limit, if it is at 500 gigs you wont be able to host all your clients on one package.

Search around here, there are a few people who got into the beta. From what I've heard, when it comes down to it, the system is fairly expensive as you can host unlimted domains, but only on so many accounts....or something like htat.

Originally posted by mj4589
Our prayers have been answered! No longer do we need our own servers, staff, bandwidth, or anything else.

Rackspace is coming out with "The Hosting System" which for $89 they will host unlimited sites, bill our customers, AND support them! Isn't this the best stupid idea ever?

Hope they won't mind us transferring our 3500 clients over to their system for them to host and support for the whopping $89/month!

http://thesystembeatstheserver.com/

i don't know...it sound too good. for only 89 they will give you everything and a pie ;)

kinda sound too good to be troof. :D

mmmm pie

:rofl: :roll2:

Then again, we cant just take an offer without taking into consideration its experience in support , billing , business practices and evaluation of its performance can we? Nothing is considered, nothing is gain. If we have considered so far, it is only the price tag.

Joshua

Originally posted by mj4589
Our prayers have been answered! No longer do we need our own servers, staff, bandwidth, or anything else.

Rackspace is coming out with "The Hosting System" which for $89 they will host unlimited sites, bill our customers, AND support them! Isn't this the best stupid idea ever?

Hope they won't mind us transferring our 3500 clients over to their system for them to host and support for the whopping $89/month!

http://thesystembeatstheserver.com/

If that's your opinion, then i suggest you take a closer look. I believe they restrict certain things.

Sounds to me like you'd have to purchase it with one of their servers. So you're bandwidth and space would be restricted by the level of server you purchased.

I wouldn't like to have them handling billing and tech support if I were a reseller, takes away too much of the personnal service and client care that is a key selling point for a reseller....

I looked over the offer for "beta" but didn't do it (no need). IMHO what this appears to be:
Rackspace used to be a real techno-leader in advanced hosting and IT solutions. Last time I had visited their site I noted the market must have driven them to a more conventional and less expensive approach. They seemed to look like most datacenter-server resellers-hosts-whatever. Fairly stock offers.

Now what this new system looks like to me is exactly what they were offering to hosts several years ago. Clustered, load-balanced, fail-over, servers with shared data storage. (Obviously new software for this venture to host multiple clients) The old system was the system of my dreams. Complete fail-safe solution, fast fast fast no matter the loads, huge storage, I could have hosted thousands of sites on one of those babies with everybody happy (unless a meteor hit Rackspace).
But I doubt they sold many for the same reason I didn't buy one...EXPENSIVE! So even though these solutions would be far more cost and performance effective than having say 25+ dedicated servers, a company can start with 1 dedicated and build to 25+ as income grows, the old Rackspace system required the huge "up front" investment. To me (and I was wrong once before) this looks like they took that technology they have had for a long time and developed software to split it between multiple hosts rather than one host having the entire system. It makes sense if it works.
I could see the great advantages to their old systems compared to today's average "large" host who might have 20-50 servers any one of which can fail or be overloaded by a client bringing down all the clients on that box. With the old Rackspace system the next server just took over, the data was always being mirrored on the big HD arrays, nobody would notice while one server was being repaired.
Seems like marketing got with development and figured out how to sell some technology they had and weren't selling. Only time will tell how it all works out. May be the best thing since sliced bread, or people may find limitations or bugs in the system and prefer the old way...:eek:

The unlimited is not unlimited.

http://thesystembeatstheserver.com/view_message.php?id=7

Storage and Bandwidth Ideas

Each site you set up will be provisioned with a comfortable amount of disk space and bandwidth. Right now, we're thinking 50 MB of drive space and 1 GB of monthly transfer, but we welcome your comments as to what seems reasonable. We run thousands of sites, and the average site uses well under 20 MB of disk space. If you do have clients who want more space or bandwidth, it will be available in packages that you can add for a small fee. So you'll be able to offer much larger hosting plans and still make good margins. And with terabytes and terabytes of storage available at our disposal, and with one of the largest and most advanced networks in the industry, we're not pulling the old trick of overselling our capacity and keeping our fingers crossed.

We'd love to offer an $89 hosting system where everyone gets 900GB of space and transfer. But that would mean low quality bandwidth and storage that's neither fast nor redundant. And it would also mean that we're offering the wrong product--more space than most sites could ever use but without the redundancy, load-balancing, security, and backup that's really required to keep a site going.

So if you need tons and tons of super-cheap bandwidth and storage, this really isn't the solution you are looking for. That's okay, because we think that need is filled by other providers, and we're not trying to compete there. However, there are a lot of web agencies, developers, and system integrators whose customers expand and demand an offering that is technically impressive, extremely stable, and monitored every second. In short, enterprise grade hosting. That's what we set out to do. We really think we have something very compelling. As always, we welcome your feedback.

So it will be a "one plan" thing?

*after reading it propperely* no it wont.

:blush:

Got to admit they have a great marketing slogan.

I think this is awesome. Especially for hosts starting out

Originally posted by Dons Card Hut
I think this is awesome. Especially for hosts starting out

Yea maybe but how much money can you make selling 50mb disk space and 1 gb bandwidth.

For example i sell 1-2 gb disk and 20 gb bandwidth for 9.95$ a month.

Originally posted by WebDogPro
Yea maybe but how much money can you make selling 50mb disk space and 1 gb bandwidth.

For example i sell 1-2 gb disk and 20 gb bandwidth for 9.95$ a month. If you sell hosting as a commodity, then you will not be able to sell it for much.

However, I have been part of a company in the past that sold 50mb of disk space and 1gb bandwidth for over $200/month.

Of course, this was on a platform that guaranteed 100% uptime, and was marketed towards companies willing/ready to pay a huge premium for instant support/service and an SLA.

So.. it just depends on what you're selling and to whom. The commodity (low-cost hosts) aspect of hosting is limited, however.. and it's almost impossible to compete with the huge players such as ipower, 1and1, interland, etc. If rackspace is trying to target people who think they can compete against the high volume low cost hosts.. then they're just stupid.

But if they are going to release a "system" that will allow the owner to compete in the high value premium services market, then they might do ok.

That is true...

Its a step in the right direction at least.

The phone support and billing options are at additional cost and can be paid on a per client basis. They are NOT free.

Fasthosts have been offering this for years, as have many others (and they're all crap) - where is there something new here ?

Wow, what a system they;ve come up with, Good luck to them

so any feedback for those who are beta testing ?

definitely something I'm interested in -- and had a great experience with Rackspace a while back using one of their dedicated servers ...

thanks.

I am interested as well... anyone had a trial of the system?

when it sounds too good to be true...

i'm with you Lagerlvr ...does sound too good -- and the comments on their site have dried up -- nobody giving them much feedback anymore....hmm.

but hoping it works out ... I think their is a huge market for moderately priced reseller-like hosting with 24/7 support like Rackspace and a good network ...

I'm hoping they pull it off :)

Originally posted by WebDogPro
Yea maybe but how much money can you make selling 50mb disk space and 1 gb bandwidth.

For example i sell 1-2 gb disk and 20 gb bandwidth for 9.95$ a month.

We sell 25mb disk space and 1gb transfer for $20.00 CDN. Just because it is expensive for the WHT market, doesn't mean it is too expesive for everyone. We never claim to be the cheapest in the market, nor do we try to be. It all depends on your target marketing.

*MODS: This was not meant to be an advertisement, simply helping express how the point of view varies from customer to customer.

Originally posted by whatever
I am interested as well... anyone had a trial of the system?

I'm a beta tester and have not received anything concerning testing their system. I believe they are still performing internal testing.

theres going to have to be some kind of catch to this systrem. Personally, i wouldnt want someone to full support all of my clients. I wouldnt learn anything, i wouldnt really frow with the company.

Originally posted by holiday
theres going to have to be some kind of catch to this systrem. Personally, i wouldnt want someone to full support all of my clients. I wouldnt learn anything, i wouldnt really frow with the company.

Having Rackspace support your clients is optional and on a per client basis.

so has anything come of this ?

still seems to be in beta and very little feedback ...

It really sounds a lot like H-Sphere...

This is nothing special or revolutionary... Separating the different hosting services into self-healing clusters has been around for a long time. It's a fairly simple system actually, just somewhat costly.

The only thing that strikes me as off is they say "No downtime" all for $89/month and unlimited websites. The hardware aspect alone for setting up a true 100% uptime system would cost much more then this.