Howdy WHT-ers!

I am a former Rackspace employee who provided Fanatical Support to thousands of customers and went on to be a heavy contributor to the system which connects ticketing, sales, monitoring, and provisioning and more or less drives the actions of everyone else in the company.

After some years, I gave up the ghost and talked some clients into moving to Rackspace, and we've had nothing but messes. In many cases I haven't made a dime on a project because where Rackspace should have freed up some of my resources and improved our service, the opposite of both happened, and I became overly busy asking Rackspace to meet the basic offering that we hoped to leave behind.

My question to you, WHT community is:

If not Rackspace, who?

90% of what people using Rackspace need is provided by modern "Dedicated" providers, and they seem to fall through on a lot of the further promises they are willing to make. Even many of my expectations based on how I and my contemporaries provided service have been poorly met.

Who are you using that provides automated / managed backups beyond FTP or a NAS? Howabout SAN access? Remote reboot? Who has the best redundancy?

Do you split your network between multiple providers, for different reasons, and if so, whom, when, and why?

Do you use slices / vms or application hosting services? Are there other alternatives I'm not thinking of which provide similar level of services and lack of worry?

It's become a lot of worry for me to deal with Rackspace and I have nothing but bigger projects coming every year.

Thanks in advance!

Justin

Justin,

I'm not really sure what you're trying to get out of this post. Do you want to know why people are choosing other managed providers, and why?

Exactly. For years as an employee, customer, and anti-customer of Rackspace I've come to WHT and I see all this "Oh, if you are serious and can afford blah blah, choose Rackspace" bull. I helped to build a lot of the processes, they arent meeting the goals we set in like 2003.

I want to hear from people esp who have been Rackspace customers or work for companies who were at one point. People who transitioned away would be good.

And also, yes, in general, who are people using? We have had some boxes with SoftLayer, who ranks higher on NetCraft than Rackspace, though of course the top ten are all marginally ever down. We use ThePlanet right now, and SliceHost for development, QnD, burstable needs, etc..

I just started work with a new client who is a pretty sizeable Rackspace customer, and I may present an argument for moving away to get 2-3 times as many servers, as we are peaked in load all day and depend / rely on / trust them to do very little.

Where do we turn that I haven't heard of? Surely there are companies in this space.

If not, hell, tell me what a company in this space should be doing that noone is. I can tell you a few. ;)

Peace, Love, and Silent Pagers..

J

Your posts are still a bit cryptic but I am assuming the bottom line is you are looking for someone other than Rackspace because Rackspace has become incompetent or lazy to keep up with your demands?

Well from my experience of companies like rackspace is that their "support" is mostly hype. If they could really do management, then companies like iNet dont need to hire system administrators.

But the only real way you can deploy and keep up with your kind of demand is to have your own team which you can control directly. I dont know if thats in your budget but no matter what company we can recommend I'm sure you will come back with issues with them one way or another.

I hope I helped to answer your questions... or made it more harder for you decide?

There are many out there.. and well almost to many. But Im sure every company has there ups and downs. I'v never tryed rackspace, but the point im trying to get at is.. there is no perfect hosting company and in the end... we are just provided space on a server.

-good luck.

Have you considered liquidweb? They have two DC's now, keep their backups stored in the new DC, provide managed servers and have some excellent (and speedy) support going on. Their uptime is consistently greater than 99% as well.

The only things you might miss are the fact that they don't have a remote reboot function on their site and a couple of the more advanced features places like ThePlanet sport.

Servers and network are rock solid though. I'm fitting to write my two year review for them here soon.

You should have a look at Ultraspeed. They're a small company but very friendly and as their client base isn't as big as Rackspace, they give a very customised and deserved service. They're based in London.

You should have a look at Ultraspeed. They're a small company but very friendly and as their client base isn't as big as Rackspace, they give a very customised and deserved service. They're based in London.

how do you know there client base is not as big? :eek:

Unitedhosting do some very good managed services and they are very active on support and backups which I can promise you is more then hipe. Used to be a customer until I moved to my own dedicated solution along with rackspace/network etc.

There is no perfect answer. Isn't this the dilemma all serious IT pro's/consultants have? Who can you trust? You want someone you can trust to be there and fix problems when they happen. Nobody wants to put their critical applications somewhere and then not be able to get service/support when you need it. Some big companies can be good and so can small ones. It just depends on who's running the show. As it was said above, get your own team together and do it yourself. That's always going to be your best bet. That's what my company did and it was the best decision i could have made. When my clients have a server problem effecting their application i have physical access to the servers if needed. We don't have to worry about some idiot tech support person not being able to help. If you're dealing with small time shared hosting stuff it wouldn't be as important to have 'rackspace' like hosting. Most customers spending less than $20/month aren't hosting critical applications on their accounts and you can afford some downtime in exchange for the cheaper pricing.

Greetings Justin:

We do transition businesses away from Rackspace.com for a variety of reasons including extremely terrible fanatical support.

For one of our managed service customers, we had to put on a MOTD on each of their servers for Rackspace.com to leave their hands off the server period, because every single time they would jump in without asking, they would cause damage for assumptions made in their effort to be fanatical.

Fanatical support does not mean fanatical intelligence, wisdom, or experience. It can mean down systems because of outright making dump mistakes.

Thank you.

From where I sit, as an account exec for a Managed hosting provider in the Midwest. I see 2 big important technology trends to customer service launch success.
1. VMware. Virtualization means faster provisioning and easier re-provisioning when the customer reveals at the last possible second what their requirements REALLY are. It is also nice to hand the VM to customer like you would hand them a DVD, have them do things with the VM and hand it back.
2. Vembu Storgrid and all of the many homegrown backup to disk solutions that are similar in features and power.

As far as who to trust, the real questions to be asking are the age, experience and maturity of the hosting engineers of the vendor you are considering. Are the NOC and hosting staff W2 salaried full-time benefited employees? Or are they part-timers, contractors, 1st job out of schooling, non benefit employees with big turnover?

HostGator has dedicated servers dont they?

I haven't seen a corporation to fulfill all the task and internal projects its has set as goals. I think that Rackspace and all other major industry level providers has just build a reliable infrastructure and implemented a successful service model. That's it. Anyone who has a view and financial support can do it. I think that I've seen a few companies around which will be discussed in almost every WHT's post within an year or two just the way most forum members talk about Rackspace.

I have to second LiquidWeb - I've been with them for about three years now and while yes, there were a couple of problems, never ever did I feel they weren't working on them or just didn't care.

As for Rackspace, frankly I would never go with them. When LW was having DOS issues, I checked around "just in case" and one of those places was Rackspace. After outlining what I needed, the sales guy hemmed and hawed and after finally quoting the price, gave me a really snooty "And do you think you could afford that, because we don't need to go much further if you can't as our prices are a bit higher due to our quality" with this tone in his voice that amazed me.

The sales guy, frankly, acted as if Rackspace would be doing me a favor by letting me be there as opposed to selling me on why I should commit to paying them $30,000+ a year. If I am paying someone $30,000+ a year, it doesn't seem to me like they are the ones doing me a favor.

They also severely denigrated my current data center, who's been really good to me - when I told them I wasn't calling to hear negatives about LiquidWeb but positives about them and why I should consider them, he got rather annoyed with me. I asked him to name what I would get from them that justified their price that I didn't have now, absolutely nothing he named I didn't have already. "Well, then just stay there."

Which, I did. :P

I was so appalled at their "we're too good for you but we'll let you in IF you pay our exorbitant prices" that I cut the conversation short and didn't even consider them beyond that. I've been down that road once a long time ago with Alabanza - at least with Alabanza, you got your rear kissed for the above-market prices that you paid. Rackspace couldn't even manage courtesy.

If Rackspace was the last data center on earth, I'd open a shoe store.

Bottom line is this people. The only thing that they do differently is that they "Aim Their Marketing at Corporate America". And corporate buyers eat up what their spin meisters put forth. That is the key behind Rackspace's success. Like it or not.

I also would recommend Liquid Web. They have 2 DC's going to be 3 beginning the 1st quarter of 2009. They should be able to meet your demands or you might even want to check out The Planet's Managed Division "NorthStar".

All the best,

When LW was having DOS issues, I checked around "just in case" and one of those places was Rackspace. After outlining what I needed, the sales guy hemmed and hawed and after finally quoting the price, gave me a really snooty "And do you think you could afford that, because we don't need to go much further if you can't as our prices are a bit higher due to our quality" with this tone in his voice that amazed me.
I'm with Liquid Web and I also called Rackspace during that time and I got a snooty sales guy who told me Rackspace didn't support Wordpress blogs. He said it in a condescending tone as if my little blog (with 50,000 uniques a day) wasn't worthy of their hosting.

I have a friend who had a big blog on Rackspace with revenue in the millions. He had serious issues with Rackspace every month. His database would be down for days. Finally he got hacked and Rackspace wasn't able to restore his data. Needless to say, he's no longer with Rackspace. :)

I'm with Liquid Web and I also called Rackspace during that time and I got a snooty sales guy who told me Rackspace didn't support Wordpress blogs. He said it in a condescending tone as if my little blog (with 50,000 uniques a day) wasn't worthy of their hosting.

I have a friend who had a big blog on Rackspace with revenue in the millions. He had serious issues with Rackspace every month. His database would be down for days. Finally he got hacked and Rackspace wasn't able to restore his data. Needless to say, he's no longer with Rackspace. :)

I do have to hand it to them that they have a fantastic marketing shtick that makes you think of their data center as some kind of exclusive club that you'd want to be in to be cool - but the fact is their sales guys can't answer SIMPLE questions about their network (How many connections with how many providers do you have, how much bandwidth do you run per second and what's your capacity). He said he would find out, and never did - he was more focused on the pricing and whether I would be willing to pay it.

As far as I could tell, there was nothing special about them other than their elitist attitude - if I want someone to condescend to me I could go walk to the Neiman Marcus Jewelry counter in an old pair of cheap jeans and get it for free.

I was so happy that LW finally got the extra pipes up - I so didn't want to leave. The little I dealt with Rackspace made me realize how lucky I was to be where I was.

To answer the thread title, from my own opinion = WiredTree.com!

I used to have 3 VPS' with them (From the start), however now I have a managed dedicated server with them, to which I'll give a review in 2009, they have just been great and downtime is not a factor for my clients anymore as they proactively manage it all. All in all, WT would be my choice any day, even if price was the factor of any company being cheaper, including RackSpace to which I'm getting mixed reviews about.