just about to purchase rackspace server

PIII 650, 512Mb, 20Gb hard-disk for $172/month
redhat 7.2

do you think it is worth it ?

This is a Rackspace server from Rackspace.com? I assume not since they don't have a server configuration with that low a monthly fee. I use Rackspace for free but that's because I won the server for the next two years in a contest giveaway. :stickout

I am considering the same configuration, except with AMD 650 instead of PIII.

Any advice?

Thanks

yes ... i talked to their sales person ...

and they offer me AMD 650 (not PIII 650) with the price mentioned above ...

i am still considering between dialtone $149 and rackspace $172

Oh, ok, they have an AMD system for $195 per month so it looks like you haggled with them for a better price. That's the specs I have for my server.

I've had Rackspace for four months and they have been PHENOMENAL in their support. The server has never been down, I only host 15 domains right now but I've had a ton of questions for support and they've either answered immediately on toll-free support or within an hour or two via E-mail. I know Windows inside-and-out but I know diddly about Red Hat Linux. Initially, my free server was setup with Red Hat Linux 7.1 but I realized I had no idea how to use Webmin so I asked them to install Plesk PSA 2.0. Now I can setup a website in 30 seconds. Although I'm a computer consultant I prefer to focus on business more than learning every little technology in-depth. I used to use AIX but it didn't help much for setting up everything in Linux.

Is Rackspace more money? Sure, but you get what you pay for (it's even better when it's FREE). I'm not worried that my server won't be taken care of. In fact, I scheduled the time for my Plesk upgrade in the wee hours of the morning and the account manager contacted me to work out the details then the tech did it within an hour at that specified time and then contacted me that he was done. Absolutely zero hassles other than having to be down for one hour but I couldn't see any way around that.

Price makes people look at places like Rackshack but quality makes people look at Rackspace.

I see someone has talked to Khaled over at Rackspace. He always mentions the smoking deals even when they've not made it to their website yet. I'm currently on a dual Pentium III over there and couldn't be happier. For the specs, price and datacenter, I'd take that deal. You'll never change datacenter's again. I can't say enough about rackspace. Rackspace completes me. :D

I have seen many poor comments about Dialtone on this forum. Try a search for Dialtone.

On the other hand, I have not seen anything negative about rackspace. I just signed with them today.

Nawaz

Here's an E-mail showing Rackspace's level of support. They let you know what they're doing all the time (this is a first that service might be interrupted for me though):

This is a reminder of the upcoming scheduled maintenance in our San Antonio, Texas IDC. The original notice was sent on Friday, May 24, 2002. The original notice follows:

This is a notice to inform you about the scheduled maintenance in our San Antonio, Texas IDC. Although we will make every effort to avoid any service interruption, it has become necessary for us to perform maintenance that could temporarily disrupt or degrade service for some customers.

The maintenance window is scheduled from 12:05 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. on Sunday June 2, 2002 in the United States, Central Standard Time. During this maintenance window, Rackspace will be performing the following activities:

-Upgrade hardware and software on network equipment.
-Add 2 new Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches to increase LAN capacity. -Add 1 new Cisco GSR 12000 router to increase WAN capacity.

We'll strive to minimize downtime, however, you may experience 10 to 15 minute outages during this period. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

If you have any questions, please contact our customer care center by calling 800-961-4454 (Intl. +1-210-892-4030) or by visiting us on the Web at http://my.rackspace.com. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and your customers. However, these changes are necessary for us to continue to provide the optimal network performance and reliability that
you expect from Rackspace Managed Hosting.

Sincerely,

Rackspace Fanatical Support(TM) Team

swijaya0101,

That $172 a month is for a 1 year contract right?

I would try to get them to up the ante a little. Maybe throw in a bigger hard drive or a little more bandwidth.

yes ...

the only problem I encountered with racksapce is

everytime i chat with different sales person ... the price are different ...

1- How much bandwidth is bundled with that $172 server ? :D
2- How much do they charge for Plesk and CPanel ? :D:D

Mac

30Gb ... only outgoing is counted ...

for PLESK if you have your own license they dont support it ...

if you lease from them ... the charge is $20/month for the 30 domains license

..............

FYI, just chat with their sales person again ... they told me that the $172 is actually used-hardware. For a brand new hardware it will cost $222/month (including PLESK 30 domains).


i become more and more confused ... whether to choose rackspace or dialtone ... have been patronized their website for the last 4 days.

swijaya0101,

Both offer very good services....you can't really go wrong with either.

Depending on your needs, one may have slight advantages over the other.

Additionally, DT was just purchased by Interland. They've made no changes to their services yet and continue to promise that any changes will be for the better. For now, I take them at their word.

Ultimately, my guess is that DT will gladly beat any price rackspace offers. DT also offers more managed services for those who might require occasional/frequent support with running their server.

If you post what your purposes are for the server and what your experience level is, you might get better feedback regarding which company to choose.

percent5,

my purpose is for online game ... something like neopet ...
but mine is more to the war game.

coding is done in PHP with MySQL

swijaya0101,

Well if that $172 price is for used hardware then they are misleading people because I don't see anywhere on their site where it states that.

Best thing to do is fill out the form and have them send you a contract. Then haggle with them off of that in e-mail conversation which would be documented.

swijaya0101,

From the sounds of things, I would probably recommend DialTone. Their prices are probably better and service comperable.

If you're just hosting your own site, you probably don't need plesk. If you just want a basic control panel that will help you do email and site setup, DT offers that for free with their servers.

If you're really sold on RS, you should be able to get a better price than $172/mo on a 1 yr conract.

hi Matrix + others,

thanks for your help ... have decided to sign up with dialtone ...

Many people has mentioned good things about rackspace ... but to me they are not a qualified professional managed hosting. They cant even get the same price among their sales person.

here is the message from rackspace:
Please don't communicate through site submission if you are already dealing with someone, you're not going to get a better deal by doing that. We all work together here and have to stick to our pricing.

but hey ... imagine that i can get 5 different prices by chatting with 5 different people:

$172, $185, $202, $220, $245

i wonder if their support is really good .... even if they are ... first impresion will always tell me how good is a company.

I have found their support to be good in the most part but also found that they do have a policy of following their policy on what they will and wont do, and this is where it can cost the inexperienced if they are not careful with their server.

Other than that....no drama's....

Originally posted by swijaya0101
Many people has mentioned good things about rackspace ... but to me they are not a qualified professional managed hosting. They cant even get the same price among their sales person.They provide probably the best managed hosting, but at a price... I prefer to pay more for something if it means it doesn't cause you any trouble in the future. There's no point in paying less and then you end up not getting the amount of support that you wanted and you end up spending late nights trying to fix the problem yourself.

I assumed that the lowest price of $172/month was your first quote, usually I would just take that first quote, or work with them on a lower price with the same sales staff, I wouldn't go to another sales rep and ask for their price. Rackspace are well known here and everywhere, and we all know that they are expensive, but they give you what you pay for.

Alan

I am going to put in my 2 cents about RackSpace.com as I am now a very unhappy ex-customer of theirs. I signed up with them and planned on moving a lot of sites from another Datacenter over to them since the seem to have better support. They are much more expensive than the other companies and they would not let me buy my license for Plesk.
Well within the first week the CPU fan stopped and burned up the processor. which tells me they gave me a used box more than likely. They fixed that after having about 8-10 hours of down time because they could not figure out what was wrong. It happened in the morning hours so the DNS got cached and took forever to resolve (lots of unhappy New customers)
Well that got resolved but I spent the money on the RackSpace.com Linux BouceBack which is their back up system. They charge a fair about on it but when they did the back up each week it took 40 minutes to backup less than 1 gig of customer files (total under 2 gigs including OS) They told me that it is normal. When I questioned how long it would take to back up a server, based on that speed, on a full server?? I figure about 6 hours and when I asked support they agreed and said that sounds right??? 6 hours off-line to do a back up? What a joke!! Well I have been with the for 3 months and I have questioned the bounce back every week after it takes so long and every week I am being told that nothing is wrong. Well I finally got someone at the company to admit that there could be a problem (do you think) and they said they could look into it but it would require more down time... Why did they not just get a new box running and switch me out? Crazy!!! Anyway I cancelled my service and even though they sold me bum equipment they stuck me to the contract and I wound up paying about $1500 and only used about a total of 5 gigs of BW the whole time.
I suggest being very careful with these guys.. Don't okay anything until you know you server is running good.
they do have a strong network but no company should treat the small guys like us with such disrespect as to not fixing a problem when they should have known no hard drive backup should take that long.
My 2 cents.
Robert

Oh well, I hope they are happy that they screwed you out of $1,500 because your post will probably cost them more in lost sales.

My reason for posting was not to hurt them but most people can't afford to lose $1500 like that. We can deal with the loss (not that we are very happy) but there are a lot of people out there that would go broke if they had to spend that much money and then have to move all their New customers else where. We wound up having to refund money on several clients because of the Name Server and down time between the two servers.

The part I forgot to mention was the fact that I was only into the contract for three months and they told me I would still have to pay for the next three months until the contract ran out. Well they did not tell us that they were going to take it all at once. They took the money out of our bank account the same day we requested them to pull the server off line. Not one month at a time for the next three months but all three months that same day and they did not bother to even send the normal monthly notice that they do on their regular billing.

The funny part is if I knew they were going to be hateful like that I would have rented out the server to some spammers and got my months worth. :)

Even though I sang praises about their service when I first signed up all I can say is if you have trouble... you can have REAL Trouble.. They are just to big and once you get a good following like they do it is easy to let problems slide by and you stop worrying about the small guys like me.

Robert

It is always not the price but the service
so that price just go for it!
but don't cry when you need a help
alex

<<Removed: Already posted elsewhere>>

What's the limit on # of Domains you can host with rackshack.net?

They offer tons fo bandwidth and space, but i keep readin where people say a 30 domain maximum. whats the point of all the space/bandwidth if you can't load up on sites and use it?

Rackshack does not have a domain limit.

Unless you are talking about the control panel, plesk, that comes with the server. But the default domain limit on that is 200, and you can pay to upgrade the control panel itself.

Otherwise, just get a plain box, and host as many domains as you want.

Peter

rackspace is way too expensive.

here is rackspace linux enterprise plan

Dual AMD 1.53 GHz Processor
1GB DDR RAM
SCSI RAID Controller Drive
18GB SCSI Drive
18GB SCSI Drive
18GB SCSI Drive
AIT 2 50gig Tape Drive
30GB (30GB incld.) Burstable Bandwidth
Monthly $1369.00


I currently own 2 servers in dialtone.com and both of them have same spec.
my server power is

Dual P3 1GHZ
1G RAM
18 SCSI HD
100 Burstable Bandwidth
monthly payment : 595

and dialtone is good at 24/7 service .
and if you set your ticket to emergency level, they will respond you in 5 min. and their phone line is always on.
hard reboot is free and ip is free .

still.. rackspaceis crazy

Well to recap what happened to me. I got several more phone calls from RackSpace and they asked if there was anything they could do to basically keep my mouth shut about what happened. I told them that they need to cut their loss and not charge me for the three months that I did not get and they said they could not do it since I signed a contract. Even though they did not give me the service I paid for I still got stuck!!!!! I would say go with anyone besides RackSpace.

I went to another DC and bought my new server Dual PIII, 1 Gig Ram, 4 HD-SCSI Raid 5 with Hot Swap 65 gigs of traffic and it is costing me $149.00/month to co-locate + $49 for a second DNS server at a second DC they own running on a different network.
I bought my plesk 2.5 license through them at only $199 for 300 license.

Rackspace is a rip off since you can't buy anything and you have to do it through them or they won't support it at all.

STAY AWAY!!!!

My 2 cents
Robert

Sonic, your comparison is viable... both companies provide a superior service and from your post, there's no doubt that DT is far cheaper. Also, with the DT and Interland joining together has made them the #1 managed hosting company in the world, above Rackspace. But I personally would stick with Rackspace (I've never tried DT, so I can't really comment on them). Rackspace have more tier 1 bandwidth providers compared to DT, which is one of the advantages that just came to mind... also, Rackspace provides a 99.999% uptime SLA, whereas DT only gives 99.9%, even though Rackspace has had 100% uptime during the past 12 months (excluding scheduled downtimes of course).

DT certainly is a big competitor of Rackspace's... but Rackspace is still a strong and profitable company. And with the high prices, they'' have the cash to ensure that the company remains in the positive and keep customers happy by providing the best quality of service possible as what they're known for. It's always down to "you get what you pay for". I know that isn't always the case but that's what Rackspace stands for, you get the superior service because you've paid for it.

Alan