I recently contacted rackspace to upgrade the amount of bandwidth on one of my servers. They quoted me $2.75 per GB of bandwidth! This is to purchase it outright. I understand a fee this high on overages, but what makes rackspace's bandwidth so good that they can sell it at $2.75 per GB?

They have several providers, and do offer 99.999% uptime (less than 24 seconds downtime a month) but I still cannot understand the high price.

If someone could shine some light on this I would much appreciate it ;)

EDIT :: Thought you said Rackshack... sorry.

- James

I think people are confusing rackspace and rackshack here.

-Brendan

I am talking about Rackspace ( http://www.rackspace.com ) :)

Rackspace hasn't dropped their prices in over a year.

How do they do it? Generally the people who buy managed hosting don't know very much. ;)

Actually the reason I use rackspace is because of the uptime. In 2 years I my servers have never come down unless I reboot them.

In fact, I dont even understand why its "managed". I do all the maint. on them myself, and create all my own accounts. All they do is provide the servers.

If you could show me another provider who has dedicated servers with uptime that good, and is a little cheaper, I would gladly look into them.

Originally posted by cperciva
Rackspace hasn't dropped their prices in over a year.

How do they do it? Generally the people who buy managed hosting don't know very much. ;)

I would disagree with this. The people who buy rackspace managed hosting buy it because of its reliability, they are willing to pay a little more to get the quality they need for their application. Not because they 'know less' they in fact may very well know more and thats why they choose them.

-Brendan

I used to have a server with RackSpace. It never went down unless I wanted it to. That's worth $2.75/GB to me.

I remember several months ago when $2.75 per GB was considered cheap. With RackSpace, you pay for high reliability, and not everyone uses Cogent, you know. :)

I gladly pay the $2.75 for bandwidth. The cost of both the software and hardware are also at a premium at Rackspace. However, I have absolutely no complaints and have never once regretted my decision to go with Rackspace.

I agree that it was a hard decision to initially choose Rackspace over say, Rackshack which would offer twice as much as far as hardware goes and virtually unlimited bandwidth for half the price. What helped me make this decision was the realization that an extra $100 or so per month wasn't going to make or break my business. So, I decided to eat this cost and develop my business plan around it.

So far, I have never had a problem with my hardware and uptime has been 100%. Also, if I have any problem with the software I know that tech support is only a phone call away and usually go above and beyond what is required of them. Customers never seem to forget a period of downtime so I feel my investment in Rackspace with a record so far of 0% downtime has actually been cheap.

David Delisle

Greetings:

"They have several providers, and do offer 99.999% uptime (less than 24 seconds downtime a month) but I still cannot understand the high price."

High price compared to what competitor that offers 99.999% network uptime and 2-hour or less hardware repair / replacement that has their own data center and in-house tech support?

Thank you.

That $2.75/GB is a bit high but I think you can drop it by purchasing it in bulk (50 GB or so)? Aside from this, Rackspace network is very good and reliable.

Originally posted by twrs
That $2.75/GB is a bit high

It's not high at all. Try buying it off Alabanza and you'll see what high is ($10/GB)

Greg Moore

Originally posted by akashik
It's not high at all. Try buying it off Alabanza and you'll see what high is ($10/GB)

$10/GB is crazy! :eek:

Try buying through Digex. They have been known to get up to 50 per GB.

Of course some of their SLAs will give you a full month credit if they have 10 minutes of downtime. They are a very high end managed hosting company catering to the fortune 1000.

junior - do you have a server at Rackspace? Comparing them to, say, a Rackshack, is like comparing apples and oranges.

Rackspace just can't be touched when it comes to network uptime, and server reliability. The last server we leased from them was in mid-January. It runs around 50gb of traffic monthly right now with three large vbulletin clients, and it has yet to need a reboot. We are very happy with the servers we have there. I sleep easy knowing that our clients are being hosted on reliable hardware and network infrastructure.

You always get what you pay for. Do we wish Rackspace's bandwidth was cheaper? Sure, but not at the cost of reliability.

I just went to digex.com and they had no pricing information at their web site. I don't like to deal with people that don't post prices and make me waste my time getting to them. What do others think.
Bradley