Results 26 to 50 of 67
Thread: Rackspace...this a good deal?
-
08-31-2006, 12:49 PM #26Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
- Posts
- 82
softlayer is new... trying to drum up business
Originally Posted by linux-tech
-
08-31-2006, 12:52 PM #27Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
- Posts
- 82
Originally Posted by linux-tech
And have you checked out management of servers lately? I wasn't here five years ago, but I've had nothing but success and great support. But, it sounds like you don't need the hand-holding that they provide since you do updates yourself. Low-cost providers are probably your best bet, but not for me.
-
08-31-2006, 12:56 PM #28Eternal Member
- Join Date
- Dec 2004
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 10,710
Rackspace is not 100% uptime. They like to tell you that, but it's pure ********.
Rackspace - London 2 Offline for 4hrs 40mins; http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...light=London+2
Rackspace ranking;
74 Rackspace Managed Hosting
http://hyperspin.com/ranking.php?type=3MediaLayer, LLC - www.medialayer.com Learn how we can make your website load faster, translating to better conversion rates for your business!
The pioneers of optimized web hosting, featuring LiteSpeed Web Server & SSD Storage - Celebrating 10 Years in Business
-
08-31-2006, 01:03 PM #29Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
- Posts
- 82
Originally Posted by layer0
And look at how Rackspace financially responded!
Here's some of the post for furhter reading:
"i got a phone call this morning to appologise + am being issued with a touch over £400 to appologise for the inconvenience. Apparently its their first outage in 6 years!!
"Good Morning
Good news! We have restored connectivity to the LON2 Datacenter. The outage started at 20:32 GMT on 17/07/06 and lasted until 01:08 GMT on 18/07/06 which resulted in a total network downtime of 4 hours 40 minutes.
The issue was related to the C&W network infrastructure that had a failure on their network ring. We identified a design flaw on the C&W network tonight witch proved that they did not provide us with a true diverse solution we initially bought from them...
-
08-31-2006, 01:25 PM #30Junior Guru
- Join Date
- Jul 2003
- Location
- Connecticut
- Posts
- 230
Originally Posted by BillyT
-
09-01-2006, 03:38 PM #31Softlayer is less than a year old and is led by the former leaders of The Planet. This post is obviously trying to drum up business away from one of its competitors, Rackspace.
Softlayer IS , in fact, less than a year old. You're correct there. Is it led by former leaders of TP? Yes, again, you're right. HOWEVER, that says absolutely nothing about their service, or their support. It merely says that they're new to the business.
Yes, Rackspace is more expensive. A steak costs more than a cheeseburger. You get what you pay for... if you want/need support expertise and uptime, go with Rackspace. If you want to save money and try out a new company, go for it.
Network - Both have redundancy, and are incredibly stable
Support - Hands down, Rackspace loses this one. Why? Here, let's look at why:
Firstly, the Control Panel - Racspace does NOT offer CPanel. Instead, they have chosen to go with Plesk. While that's great to a degree, Plesk is hardly the "leader" in the Control Panel software, and it can be quite complicated to work with and use, from both an admin's perspective, and a user's.
Secondly, their "support". Many times I have been told by Rackspace individuals that "they won't touch the server if you change ONE thing away from their supposedly great settings". Well, this hasb een proven, time and time again to me. Not just 5 years ago, but as recently as LAST YEAR.
Thirdly, their distributions. I'm sorry, but ANYONE selling (or not upgrading) RHEL2 , ANY of the previous redhat versions (7-9), etc and NOT insisting that their customers upgrade (or upgrading for them) is just wrong. As recently as last summer, I went into various customer's servers (at rackspace) and found ANCIENT os data on there that hadn't been updated in months (some as long as 2 years). Now, can you call THAT professional support? I certainly can't.
Price:
All I have to say here is yikes. These people won't even release a price publicly because they KNOW they can't beat anyone's price. They don't even TRY to! They simply inflate their prices and claim they have the "best" out there. Well, the fact is that they DON'T.
I'm not even going to compare things of which I have no knowledge, specifically the control panel areas (ie: manage.softlayer). For what you're paying (or expected to pay), you'd think you would be able to simply login to the panel and do anything you want (ie: reboot, etc). Most likely, not the case here, but I can't say.
How can any company a year old imply that Rackspace is NOT a managed services company?
Judging by you sig and a bunch of claims I have not heard ANYWHERE else, would YOU happen to be one of these hired admins for a box at softlayer? Do I detect some outrageous bias here or what?
The day of the $75 domain is over, and the day of the $500+/month dedicated server is over as well. While there ARE a few exceptions to this (unmetered BW, etc), Rackspace is HARDLY an exception to that.
Apparently its their first outage in 6 years!!
Low-cost providers are probably your best bet, but not for me.
Let's go with, say SoftLayer's services (just an example, and it's brought up ONLY because I use them myself right now):
For an unmanaged server, you can pick up quality hardware/server stats @ SL for next to nothing (compared to Rackspace). We'll take my configuration and build from there.
A Dual Core Intel processor w/ 1g ram and 2x250g drive, CPanel and RHEL = $200 for EVERYTHING (including 2T bandwidth)
Now, add on management to that . We'll go with $100 / month, even though that's a bit on the high end.
Your total? $300/month.
Now, let's compare this to Rackspace's quote of $800+/month per server.
That's not steak, folks, that's plain ridiculous. Steak is going with SL and having a $100/month server admin plan take care of things (and yes, for ANYONE, that would most likely cover things). This is far above and beyond steak here. In fact, it's wasteful, really. Do you REALLY have $500/month that you want to just throw away for service that is supposedly the best out there, when it's not? I sure don't, and NO company will EVER convince me that $800/month (or even close) is worth it.
He's (or his company) listed in SoftLayers' "SoftLayer Certified Server Management" subforum category on SL's forums. Take that how you wish.Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
Check out my WHMCS Addons
-
09-01-2006, 03:54 PM #32Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jun 2006
- Posts
- 34
I have a hard time believing that a $100/mon is going to suffice for server management. A full time sysadmin is going to run probably $80K in major US markets. $80K a year equates to $40/hr assuming an 8hr work day. Then, basically that means you are getting 2.5 hrs of work a month from that $100/mon offering. Is that really going to be enough support? Sure doesn't seem like 24/7/365 support to me. I agree that RS is priced very high, but if you're shopping around for Tier 1 support you are not a price shopper, you are shopping based upon services offered.
-
09-01-2006, 04:30 PM #33Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
- Posts
- 82
(1) You say "I'd suggest that you actually do a bit of research before posting falsities like this." Then you spend the next two sentences proving my statements to be exactly 100% accurate. (led by former TP leaders, less than a year old)
(2) How do you define service if you claim that SL beats Rackspace "Hands down?" You list three less-than-compelling arguments to support this statement:
(a) You like CPanel ( a great product ), Rackspace only offers Plesk. This says nothing about the SUPPORT that Rackspace provides. This is a product issue. I like Plesk, I use Plesk. Maybe they will offer CPanel in the future... who knows.
(b) You claim "they won't touch the server if you change ONE thing away from their supposedly great settings". Are you talking about Rackspace or some other company with Rack in its name? Rackspace give all customers FULL ADMIN access to its servers and provides assistance no matter what customers do to its boxes. I can install whatever I want on my server and they still will help me. Can they help me with my own accounting app? No. Can they help me with the OS or database? Absolutely.
(c) You mention RH version 2... Rackspace offers RHES 4 at the moment. I got onboard when they were stlll officially selling 3.0 but I asked for 4.0 and got it. They also offer support for 3.0 and 2.1. Neither product has been EOL'd by Redhat yet. They also offer Win2k3 and SQL2005. Newer versions of RH are MORE SECURE than previous versions; you can certainly roll out an older version if you want, but at your own risk. I can roll out older versions of php or MySQL if I want, but I trust rackspace's recommendations. Also, Fedora is a desktop o/s, not a server o/s. If you want cheap hosting on low-end or outdated software, find someone else. Rackspace is an enterprise hosting company looking for customers that want such a company.
(3) Go through the sales process with Rackspace and you will quickly learn what their price is about. Most of the monthly cost has to do with the support they provide... 1hr hardware replacement, 24x7 live support, 100% uptime, etc. If you just sell software and have a handful of engineers you can easily sell cheap hosting. Rackspace has hundreds of support techs. If I want to expand my business to include a Windows server, they can do it. If I want to keep my Linux box, ad another one and cluster it, they can help. Again, it's not about hardware, it's about service. That's why I'm hosting with them.
(4) I won't go through your math right now because your examples support the lower end of the hosting market that companies like The Planet, EV1 and CI Host are targeting. I grew tired of that niche and upgraded to a more serious provider. Yes, I pay a little more, but I also sleep a little better at night.
Let's just agree to disagree. I think that Rackspace is worth the money for the support that they give me (which I need). Perhaps more technical customers out there don' t need the hand-holding and can go with an unmanaged server somewhere else. To each his own.
peace...
-
09-01-2006, 04:58 PM #34I have a hard time believing that a $100/mon is going to suffice for server management.
you spend the next two sentences proving my statements to be exactly 100% accurate.
Go through the sales process with Rackspace and you will quickly learn what their price is about.
Also, Fedora is a desktop o/s, not a server o/s. If you want cheap hosting on low-end or outdated software, find someone else. Rackspace is an enterprise hosting company looking for customers that want such a company.
Are you talking about Rackspace or some other company with Rack in its name? Rackspace give all customers FULL ADMIN access to its servers and provides assistance no matter what customers do to its boxes.
I won't go through your math right now because your examples support the lower end of the hosting market that companies like The Planet, EV1 and CI Host are targeting. I grew tired of that niche and upgraded to a more serious provider. Yes, I pay a little more, but I also sleep a little better at night.
You claim you pay outrageous prices for someone who CLAIMS to be the best. That's like saying Burger King is better because they charge more than McDonalds. The point is that they AREN'T. Various providers (SL, Fastservers, etc) offer the SAME level of service for their customers, 24x7 support, incredible uptime (even RS doesn't EVER make 100%), yet charge 1/2 the price of RS, for the SAME quality and level of support.
You want low end prices for hosting? See providers like Burst, dedicadnow, and countless others that provide "budget" hosting for < $100/month (or just over). The point is that THESE are low end prices. I went with specifically HIGH end prices for the hosting market. RS has simply priced themselves out of reason. They don't offer anything special for this, they simply offer claims which can easily be refuted (and have been here, by myself).Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
Check out my WHMCS Addons
-
09-01-2006, 05:15 PM #35Eternal Member
- Join Date
- Dec 2004
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 10,710
Originally Posted by sn1per
It was NOT a power problem. They used one fiber provider only. Just ONE. How can ONE provider be redundant? Even if it's diverse circuits, etc... does not matter, it's ONE provider.MediaLayer, LLC - www.medialayer.com Learn how we can make your website load faster, translating to better conversion rates for your business!
The pioneers of optimized web hosting, featuring LiteSpeed Web Server & SSD Storage - Celebrating 10 Years in Business
-
09-01-2006, 08:14 PM #36Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Feb 2004
- Posts
- 633
Originally Posted by linux-tech
It may comes as a shock to those here dealing with $69/mo budget servers and $25/mo admin services, but the largest hosting company by far, in terms of hosting revenue, is a company that never gets mentioned here--IBM. And they are considerably more expensive than Rackspace, as is the number two company, EDS. Rackspace doesn't even really compete in what I would consider the high end enterprise hosting market, they target smaller enterprise and midmarket clients.
-
09-01-2006, 08:53 PM #37Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Mar 2001
- Posts
- 1,446
Originally Posted by linux-tech
We have a few ecommerce clients running on heavily modified RH6/7.x base OS's on managed servers, have for years, and are quite happy. No hacks, no OS problems, it works for them, so why rock the boat?
We charge more than Rackspace for some server configurations, we're not IBM, and our clients are not Fortune 500 (ok, some are Fortune 100). It's not that they do not know better, it's that we meet and exceed their expectations, make sure their sites are up, make money, and answer their questions. They know cheaper deals exist, but a few hundred a month when your site makes 50,000 or 1 million per month is not that big a deal when you've found a provider you trust.
Rackspace is not the end all and be all for everyone, but for websites that generate revenue more than a few bucks a month, the peace of mind of knowing the server is well watched over (not just by one hired admin but a team of highly skilled employees, not $8/hr reboot techs) is well worth the extra $100-$300 a month.
It's not the nuts and bolts you can provide, it's how you sell the sizzle and communicate with the client after the sale that is the true measure of success for both parties.
- John C.
-
09-01-2006, 09:22 PM #38to the small to medium sized business owner, OS versions, kernels, etc...are not important. What is important is security, uptime, and support. If Rackspace provides this (in a form different than you would like) then their customers are happy.
RH6-9 can EASILY be updated to a CentOS3 (which is still maintained) setup without causing a bit of downtime, or data loss, so there's no reason those shouldn't be updated.
RHEL2, well, that's just wrong. RH may provide updates for them still, but they're not as updated as the 4.x (and previously, the 3.x) versions are.
Even knowing that, the software was not updated at all. Running up2date (which should be run regularly manually) showed that these were countless subversions behind, and critical stuff (kernels are always critical updates) were ignored. Not good.
the peace of mind of knowing the server is well watched over (not just by one hired admin but a team of highly skilled employees, not $8/hr reboot techs) is well worth the extra $100-$300 a month.
If the datacenter doesn't examine your logs, and has no clue that you're running perl scripts such as dos.pl or something else, how is that "well watched"?
If the datacenter doesn't know who's logging in your server, and what it's doing, how is that "well watched"?
It's just not feasible for a larger company such as rackspace to do this for all of their clients, because it would cost them a ton more than they're actually charging people.
In addition (and no offense meant by any means to anyone), but what does it matter how many employees are @ the company, when you can get ahold of the company via any method whatsoever 24x7 via phone? It doesn't, really.
The point I'm trying to make is that this type of overcharging here is not worth it, OR a good deal. Yes, rackspace claims "We're the best", but experience shows they're not. Yes, they claim "We have no downtime", but, again, experience shows they do. Yes, they claim "We offer customer service", but experience shows that they will not provide said service on your server if you've modified things, and that's just wrong.
For the same money, you could pick up 2-3 servers at a "budget" (as it was referred to by someone else earlier) datacenter, have an admin keep an eye over them, and STILL have money left over. It's all in knowing which DC to use and which to avoid.Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
Check out my WHMCS Addons
-
09-02-2006, 05:31 AM #39WHT Addict
- Join Date
- Jan 2006
- Posts
- 127
@linux-tech:
You forget something. The people that go to Rackspace had problems with bad sysadmins or datacenters, or they heard storyes about them.
The reason why Rackspace isn't a good place to do business is because they overcharge for hardware that IS THE SAME LIKE IN ANY DATACENTER! Why should you pay for the same hardware 10x? You pay for suport, you pay for "100% uptime bandwidth" but Rackspace is using the same hardware like any datacenter. Why they charge so much for this? Because they can, not because it's better.
-
09-02-2006, 05:21 PM #40Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jul 2006
- Location
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Posts
- 38
I think some people go to Rackspace because of their clever marketing campaigns, they are trying to make us believe that if you have a server there it will be up and running 24x7x365, which is not true. 100% network uptime is one thing, 100% server and all its services uptime is another... This forum is hosted there, we had about 6-8 hours of downtime today. Don't know what caused it, but it was DOWN. There are many things that they can't control so don't expect 100% uptime, it won't happen (unless you are willing to pay a LOT more for redundant systems).
Rackspace are not hosting gods, if you pay 4x what would cost you to have your site at LT, SoftLayer, The Planet, etc, you will still have downtime, even with their Fanatical Support(tm) and other marketing gimmicks. Check their homepage: "Need managed servers with 100% uptime?", yeah right... WHT must be the exception then...
-
09-02-2006, 07:28 PM #41Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Jun 2005
- Location
- Canada
- Posts
- 2,495
Well, if we need any further proof problems happen at Rackspace. Look at what happened to WHT today!
6+ hours downtime due to a hardware failure -- pathetic. Unmanaged providers do it fasterGeeksGather - Undergoing redevelopment. Stand by.
-
09-02-2006, 08:13 PM #42Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Mar 2001
- Posts
- 1,446
Until we hear the facts on why the long downtime, throwing around the "pathetic" term is in itself pathetic. I'm not defending Rackspace, but there may have been other issues being dealt with that we are not aware of. Hopefully the WHT admins will shed some more light on this long outage.
I'll agree their marketing is a bit over the top in terms of their statements, but from everything I've seen over the years, they do a better job than most when it comes to fully managed servers. Sure, they've had a few problems, but what about the 10,000+ customers that have seen incredible uptime, great support, and a system that works without their intervention?
- John C.
-
09-02-2006, 08:33 PM #43Until we hear the facts on why the long downtime, throwing around the "pathetic" term is in itself pathetic. I'm not defending Rackspace, but there may have been other issues being dealt with that we are not aware of. Hopefully the WHT admins will shed some more light on this long outage.
At approxamately 9:30 EST time we had a hardware failure in our load balancer that caused our entire cluster to be down. Our fileup melted.
So much for 1hr hardware replacement, that's out the door right there.Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
Check out my WHMCS Addons
-
09-02-2006, 09:15 PM #44Aspiring Evangelist
- Join Date
- May 2004
- Location
- Atlanta
- Posts
- 412
Originally Posted by steven-v
-
09-02-2006, 11:22 PM #45Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Oct 2004
- Location
- Oneida, NY
- Posts
- 2,849
Originally Posted by LBXBig things coming soon
-
09-03-2006, 09:10 AM #46Eternal Member
- Join Date
- Dec 2004
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 10,710
Originally Posted by LBXMediaLayer, LLC - www.medialayer.com Learn how we can make your website load faster, translating to better conversion rates for your business!
The pioneers of optimized web hosting, featuring LiteSpeed Web Server & SSD Storage - Celebrating 10 Years in Business
-
09-03-2006, 11:07 AM #47Junior Guru Wannabe
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
- Posts
- 82
to each his own..
We can debate all day how great Rackspace is or how much we think they suck, but the numbers don't lie. They are growing at a phenominal rate, have been profitable for a long time and provide great service to me. There will ALWAYS be outages, because NO hosting provider is perfect. Let's see how long it takes for SL to suffer an outage and see if it gets mentioned ad nauseum here.
As to what Rackspace will support, I suggest you define your term of support. Rackspace will support my config with the apps I have on it. If I add an app that's not part of their offering, I support it myself. You can't expect any hosting provider to support every application out there. If they say they do, they are lying, stupid or will never scale.
If one of your 'customers' said that Rackspace refused to support them, find out if they said they wouldn't support the entire config, or just a specific component that the customer wanted. There is a huge difference. Besides, it sounds like you are referring to the lowest end of Rackspaces clientele that have a single server and want old/outdated/non-standard stuff. Those clients are better served by a smaller company such as SL where they can get cheap hardware and cheap support. Go to Rackspace's web site and see the clients they are supporting... they are real businesses with brand names people recognize. Those companies don't make rash decisions... if they go with Rackspace that tells me that Rackspace is worth it.
-
09-03-2006, 12:00 PM #48Eternal Member
- Join Date
- Dec 2004
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 10,710
We can debate all day how great Rackspace is or how much we think they suck, but the numbers don't lie. They are growing at a phenominal rate, have been profitable for a long time and provide great service to me. There will ALWAYS be outages, because NO hosting provider is perfect. Let's see how long it takes for SL to suffer an outage and see if it gets mentioned ad nauseum here.
As to what Rackspace will support, I suggest you define your term of support. Rackspace will support my config with the apps I have on it. If I add an app that's not part of their offering, I support it myself. You can't expect any hosting provider to support every application out there. If they say they do, they are lying, stupid or will never scale.
If one of your 'customers' said that Rackspace refused to support them, find out if they said they wouldn't support the entire config, or just a specific component that the customer wanted. There is a huge difference. Besides, it sounds like you are referring to the lowest end of Rackspaces clientele that have a single server and want old/outdated/non-standard stuff. Those clients are better served by a smaller company such as SL where they can get cheap hardware and cheap support. Go to Rackspace's web site and see the clients they are supporting... they are real businesses with brand names people recognize. Those companies don't make rash decisions... if they go with Rackspace that tells me that Rackspace is worth it.
Rackspace charges a lot more for their hardware because they can, NOT, I repeat, NOT because the hardware is 'better'.MediaLayer, LLC - www.medialayer.com Learn how we can make your website load faster, translating to better conversion rates for your business!
The pioneers of optimized web hosting, featuring LiteSpeed Web Server & SSD Storage - Celebrating 10 Years in Business
-
09-03-2006, 12:13 PM #49Eternal Member
- Join Date
- Dec 2004
- Location
- New York, NY
- Posts
- 10,710
Go to Rackspace's web site and see the clients they are supporting... they are real businesses with brand names people recognize. Those companies don't make rash decisions... if they go with Rackspace that tells me that Rackspace is worth it.MediaLayer, LLC - www.medialayer.com Learn how we can make your website load faster, translating to better conversion rates for your business!
The pioneers of optimized web hosting, featuring LiteSpeed Web Server & SSD Storage - Celebrating 10 Years in Business
-
09-04-2006, 02:20 AM #50Web Hosting Master
- Join Date
- Jun 2002
- Posts
- 1,874
Originally Posted by layer0