After a month or two with Rackshack the cracks are finally beginning to show. Previously I would have said their speed is great and despite the awful tech support, would have recommended them as a host. Now I can't say I would. If I had the money I'd be looking elsewhere and would not recommend them for business critical sites.

The first thing that went wrong was one of my virtual sites going down. This turned out to be them having accidentally deleted the DNS. The second thing, which brings up to today, is the entire server is now down. On calling tech support (no one bothered answering in their chat room) they discovered it had been down since 3pm the previous day, around 15 hours ago. Now I have to wait till one of their tech guys gets in, which won't be for a few hours yet. During that time there's nothing else they can say or do.

Interestingly, on asking what their guaranteed uptime was (he disappeared for 10 minutes before returning in true Rackshack fashion), he said "Between 85-90%, but don't quote me on that".

Sure, these things happen and my server may be trouble free for years to come, but maybe a picture's beginning to form that suggests all is not right. I'd be interested to know what problems other Rackshacker's have experienced.

I'd also be interested to know what Rackshack will be putting in the "Press release" section of their site. Something like "Great prices, crap support" would be difficult to avoid unless they do some sneaky, selective quoting.

Regards

Jason

I'm always on the edge of deciding to get Rackshacks' RAQ4i which is a great bargain. At the same time I'm always hesitant to do so because of their reported poor technical support. And with the increased personnel workload and network load in the past couple of months, I think I'm going to wait and see what happens in the next few weeks.

I've been with Rackshack for a month. I have one Raq there with six small to midsized virtual sites.

I have not had any problems yet. I am considering moving one of my larger clients to Rackshack, but I think I will wait another month.

I do not really have much need for their technical support, but I worry that if something were to go wrong that I could not fix remotely, I would be in trouble.

Know your Linux
From my brief encounters with tech support and what others have said, I would not use them if you are not Redhat Linux savvy. Cobalt linux is basically a modified version of Redhat (for the most part Redhat RPMS work better than the pkgs). I have been able to install a variety of programs and tightened security without any problems.



Price Plans
If you plan to run any databased backed web site, I would reccomend 256MB of RAM. There are two packages on rackshack that offer 256MB of RAM, which as far as I can tell are the same. However, one cost $128/mo and the other $169/mo. The $128 option is under the "other great values" section. The $169 offer is under the "Specials" section. I cannot tell these plans apart......aside from the price. If you get the 128MB special at $99, you can upgrade your RAM for $25/mo at a later time.

I can't access my site http://www.funs.co.uk but I can still access the raq with the ip and there is no problems there.

I emailed them and told them I think its a dns problem, but they said all the dns was set up correctly, and that it was some other issue, But I belive they deleted my dns for the domain as only a few hours before I could no longer access they manually added some stuff to dns for me, and so must have delted somthing.

I was getting this error



Unknown Host

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Description: Unable to locate the server named "www.funs.co.uk" --- the server does not have a DNS entry. Perhaps there is a misspelling in the server name, or the server no longer exists. Double-check the name and try again.


I sent them this but still they say its not a dns problem, But I can't see what else it can be, but at the momant my site is still down.

But apart from this they been good and I think they may have accidently just delted the dns when they where adding the things I wanted.

If you know any other reason why I would get that error tell me as they claim its not a dns problem and I would like it back up asap.

But apart from this they been good and I think they may have accidently just delted the dns when they where adding the things I wanted.

So they're still very good, just your site doesn't work.

From my experience the "tech support" may try to give you the impression they know what they're talking about, when in fact they don't and should just tell you straight that they can't help. This is better than the frustration caused by them pausing blankly, umming and arring and putting you on hold for half an hour.

Regards your DNS, I can't say I'd trust the first person I spoke with to tell me what was going on. I'd keep pressuring them by phone until the problem was sorted.

Regards

Jason

I've had no problems with them. The only thing that I feel that I could complain about is my server was unavailible for about 5 or 10 minutes on sunday. I have a program that checks the status of each server and thats was its responce.