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  1. #1
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    Rackspace Alternative

    Hello All!

    Just recently experienced my second power failure with rackspace.
    Power failure resulted in my MySQL database servers (Linux) hard resetting indicating the lack of a UPS. (4 other servers also hard reseted)

    Has happened twice in the past 9 days with no attempt to move my rack, or correct the problem.

    I'm really pissed this time, because it resulted in corrupted data on my Master MySQL server and is causing a whole bunch of problem in my application.

    The Alternative networks that I am looking at are
    -Media Temple
    -Liquid Web

    I would need fully managed support as I had at Rackspace.

    My setup is pretty complex, consisting of 4 load balanced clusters (5 Win3k boxes per cluster )
    5 Linux DB's on Redhat Cluster all load balanced with a hot-failover setup and all approriate networking switches and firewalls.

    Are there any rackspace converts that have gone with Media Temple or Liquid.

    How would you rate them compared to Rackspace?

    It just seems that my account is not big enough for Rackspace to care about really supporting my hardware.(Even though is costing $$$$)

    I mean, my machines hard reset twice and they still haven't put me in a new cabinet or moved me to a different power block.

    Thanks for your feedback!

  2. #2
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    Try them out for another time if it happens ask for another rack or a diffrent power block.

  3. #3
    Make some demands, like ToNeZ recommended, as that will probably make them do something about it, since many companies only start caring when you start complaining too much .

    I don't think MT does Windows management, and LiquidWeb requires Plesk from what I remember, but be sure to ask them if you do plan to move in the end.
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  4. #4
    Hello,

    Yes, is will be much better to talk with them.

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  5. #5
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    I have complained, multiple times.

    That's what really sucks about this whole situation.

    I love their personnel, it's just that my account does not move the needle over there.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm spending in 5 digit range a month (6 digits yearly) for my hosting. (Can't say how much due to NDA)

    It seems that if me being mad does not affect their standing on the NASDAQ, they could care less how much I complain.

    I just don't want to sit around and have another power issue make my MySQL boxes crash.

    I mean, im sure there dell desktops have UPS's to ensure their damn twitter messages don't get lost mid-post!!!!!

  6. #6
    Have seen these types of issues more and more with them, albeit more in the UK.

    If your spending five figures you should expect them to properly manage your systems and setup.

    I'm not sure if either of the ones you have chosen are a direct replacement for RS though, liquidweb maybe but MT have a slightly different want of doing things.
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  7. #7
    RackSpaces major competition in the "premium pricing/premium service field" is Liquidweb. The nice part about Liquidweb, is that they are a little cheaper then RackSpace yet you get the same great service

    Check them out.

  8. #8
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    I wouldn't say that liquidweb are any real competition to rackspace, not that rackspace are *that* good but they are superior to liquidweb in terms of network and support. Liquidwebs ticket responses are quite slow compared to their phone support. As system administrators generally when we are reviewing those companies it's generally always after a new customer has become frustrated with them and I would say if I had to choose between them both that rackspaces support knowledge is generally better and generally you will be escalated to someone who actually knows what they are talking about easier than with liquidweb. For example the vast majority of customers we look at generally are frustrated because of downtime caused by application level issues and the common response from reading their previous tickets with liquidweb is either buy more hardware, it's a ddos, "needs a configuration change" and things to this effect whereas rackspace will generally after a bit escalate to someone that actually understands what is going on and indicate at what the issue is (weather they assist in resolving it or not is another matter but they don't necessarily have to offer any assistance with it).

    Now weather the above means anything to you or not is another matter, just thought I'd share it. You might want to have alook at datapipe/inetu instead.


    As an interesting note, received this from rackspace about 1-2 hours ago which is probably in relation to what you have been experiencing,

    Rackspace has recently discovered that a number of batteries in the UPS cluster supporting your infrastructure need to be replaced. While we are not experiencing any issues with this Cluster, we want to take all possible steps to provide you with uninterrupted service so Rackspace is proactively replacing all batteries in this UPS cluster. This maintenance will begin tonight, Monday and continue through Wednesday.

    This evening, Monday June 22, between the hours of 11:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M. CDT, continuing on Tuesday between the hours of 9:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. and on Wednesday between the hours of 9:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M., our Engineers and Vendors will be conducting a maintenance on UPS Cluster B in our DFW Data Center. While we don’t anticipate any disruption to your service we did want to keep you informed as your configuration is supported by this UPS cluster.

    We appreciate your patience as we work through this maintenance. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us at anytime.
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  9. #9
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    Yes,

    They've emailed, read, mailed me that statement.

    I wouldn't be this concerned if my front end webservers just crashed, but my MASTER mysql box failed along with all my slaves and my hot failover.

    That's dooms day crash. I'm lucky that my whole transactional log file didn't corrupt.

    Even after that, we found short comings in the MySQL config that was preformed by their DBA's.

    My log files for my slaves were being saved/referenced from the tmp directory, thus when rebooting from hard reset mysql couldn't even re-start and took a level of trouble shooting.

    Disaster!

    I understand that everyone has issues, but the same issue in 9 days, and doing nothing to correct this.

    They could've have just plugged my MySQL boxes into a separate rack mounted UPS to give me some assurance.

    It just makes me and my company look like idiots. And if I stay on for a third power debacle, then the only idiot is myself.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by ibejohn818 View Post
    Even after that, we found short comings in the MySQL config that was preformed by their DBA's.
    Agreed pretty much their mySQL configuration is always the same and they simply change the myisam key buffer to the size of the indexes that is pretty much their entire optimization, which may be fine for the majority average setups but not for anything that actually requires alot of mySQL activity.

    Quote Originally Posted by ibejohn818 View Post
    My log files for my slaves were being saved/referenced from the tmp directory, thus when rebooting from hard reset mysql couldn't even re-start and took a level of trouble shooting.
    Not sure I understand this, first as to why the temporary directory would be used but during a reboot they shouldn't be cleared out unless I am missing some part of the setup.

    Quote Originally Posted by ibejohn818 View Post
    Disaster!

    I understand that everyone has issues, but the same issue in 9 days, and doing nothing to correct this.

    They could've have just plugged my MySQL boxes into a separate rack mounted UPS to give me some assurance.

    It just makes me and my company look like idiots. And if I stay on for a third power debacle, then the only idiot is myself.
    You are correct, it's clearly a fundamental design flaw that your slaves are setup on the same power source.
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  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott.Mc View Post
    I wouldn't say that liquidweb are any real competition to rackspace, not that rackspace are *that* good but they are superior to liquidweb in terms of network and support. Liquidwebs ticket responses are quite slow compared to their phone support.
    You are certainly entitled to your opinion but our help desk ticket response times average between 5-10 minutes. I'm not sure that can really be described as "quite slow".

    Perhaps you used us long ago?

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by LiquidWebTravis View Post
    You are certainly entitled to your opinion but our help desk ticket response times average between 5-10 minutes. I'm not sure that can really be described as "quite slow".

    Perhaps you used us long ago?
    Nonsense. In fact there is a thread from just the other day, right here on WHT which shows pretty much the exact same type of thing I expressed as my overall experience with liquidweb: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=6232469
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  13. #13
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    Travis.


    I assume you work at Liquid.

    PM me the contact information for a sales rep so I can email my configuration and get a FRIENDLY quote.

    thanks!

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott.Mc View Post
    Nonsense. In fact there is a thread from just the other day, right here on WHT which shows pretty much the exact same type of thing I expressed as my overall experience with liquidweb: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=6232469
    Scott.Mc.
    As you will notice I said "average" and the customer you are talking about had 1 ticket over 30 minutes. That's 1 ticket of the 10,000+ we handle in a month.

    We have a 30 minute response time SLA. If you have a personal experience that you are talking about I would be glad to look into your tickets or accounts and provide SLA credits if you had delayed response times.
    Travis Stoliker
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  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott.Mc View Post



    Not sure I understand this, first as to why the temporary directory would be used but during a reboot they shouldn't be cleared out unless I am missing some part of the setup.
    My replication logs files were being saved/ref'ed from the tmp var directory.

    Every time the machine reboots the tmp dir's contents are deleted.

    Making mysql hang on trying to start-up.

    I went with Rackspace so didn't have to worry about that stuff.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by LiquidWebTravis View Post
    Scott.Mc.
    As you will notice I said "average" and the customer you are talking about had 1 ticket over 30 minutes. That's 1 ticket of the 10,000+ we handle in a month.

    We have a 30 minute response time SLA. If you have a personal experience that you are talking about I would be glad to look into your tickets or accounts and provide SLA credits if you had delayed response times.
    I don't really want to keep de-railing the OP's thread but I don't doubt you answer the majority of the tickets in the time you specified however the vast majority of tickets I get to review the responses are always slow, bare in mind the only time I will be reviewing a ticket at most datacenters is if the customer is unhappy there. The other part I highlighted was the general response when there actually is an issue and I feel the general level of support during an issue is poor but I will not continue on with that, the OP is free to search these very forums and in fact just search these forums for liquidweb ddos and similar keywords and just compare the number of times when a customer has been having consistent issues with their system which is accounted down to a ddos/flood when a fair number of them are probably are not.
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  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott.Mc View Post
    I don't really want to keep de-railing the OP's thread but I don't doubt you answer the majority of the tickets in the time you specified however the vast majority of tickets I get to review the responses are always slow, bare in mind the only time I will be reviewing a ticket at most datacenters is if the customer is unhappy there. The other part I highlighted was the general response when there actually is an issue and I feel the general level of support during an issue is poor but I will not continue on with that, the OP is free to search these very forums and in fact just search these forums for liquidweb ddos and similar keywords and just compare the number of times when a customer has been having consistent issues with their system which is accounted down to a ddos/flood when a fair number of them are probably are not.
    Well this is very insightful.

    Maybe it's back to the One Whilshire Colo and super uber nerd admins to run my stuff.

    ugh

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by ibejohn818 View Post
    My replication logs files were being saved/ref'ed from the tmp var directory.

    Every time the machine reboots the tmp dir's contents are deleted.

    Making mysql hang on trying to start-up.

    I went with Rackspace so didn't have to worry about that stuff.
    Which OS is this? Since I am struggling to understand the relationship between replication not running and mySQL not starting or the tmp partitions being cleared during a reboot. You mentioned above your databases are RHEL so I assume you mean /tmp which should not be getting cleared during a reboot (by default) although it doesn't take away the fact they should not be using the temporary directory for the binary/relay logs in the first place, I am just curious as to what the actual issue was.
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  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott.Mc View Post
    just search these forums for liquidweb ddos and similar keywords and just compare the number of times when a customer has been having consistent issues with their system which is accounted down to a ddos/flood when a fair number of them are probably are not.

    Does this speculation have a factual basis?
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  20. #20
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    Are there no other alternatives?

    I'm gonna get a quote from liquid, but it seems as if their tech-support is lacking in logistics and organization.

    Has anybody use the Planet's Managed solutions?

  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by ibejohn818 View Post
    Are there no other alternatives?

    I'm gonna get a quote from liquid, but it seems as if their tech-support is lacking in logistics and organization.

    Has anybody use the Planet's Managed solutions?
    Datapipe or inetu are worth considering, as for ThePlanet's while I am not a huge fan of ThePlanet I do wonder what their new managed line is like as they have many, many great techs working for them and if they live up to the marketing they might be a good choice, so if you do use them I would be interested to hear how it works out for you.
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  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott.Mc View Post
    Datapipe or inetu are worth considering, as for ThePlanet's while I am not a huge fan of ThePlanet I do wonder what their new managed line is like as they have many, many great techs working for them and if they live up to the marketing they might be a good choice, so if you do use them I would be interested to hear how it works out for you.
    I'm getting a quote right now.

    I'll update this thread with my first impressions of both Liquid and The Planet (Which i guess is EV1)

  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by AquariusADMIN View Post
    RackSpaces major competition in the "premium pricing/premium service field" is Liquidweb. The nice part about Liquidweb, is that they are a little cheaper then RackSpace yet you get the same great service
    I don't know if I would put LiquidWeb in the same category as RackSpace. I'm not saying LiquidWeb is bad... but just not in the same league.

    Take a look at datapipe.net. They are in the same premium category.

  24. #24
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    You can also check Cartika - they can support such setups.
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  25. #25
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    Based on some RFPs and followup discussions, LogicWorks and Planet Northstar have pretty competent MySQL DBAs. They are definitely more at the Rackspace price point (probably higher actually) than at the LiquidWeb price point.

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