Results 1 to 15 of 15
  1. #1

    Thumbs down My Rackspace Cloud Site Review

    I wanted to give a honest review on my experience with Rackspace "Cloud Site" as well as their support.

    Now that I'm writing this review, none of my sites are up, and this the message instead of them:

    http://oi53.tinypic.com/ejhidf.jpg

    Thus, site takes ages to load during pick time. I'm paying $149 + 20% VAT per months for a very low quality shared hosting.

    Although they have a great support service and always available. But their cloud site services is just awful, I'm so disappointed with my choice.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Posts
    1,767
    I'm absolutely shocked that you're getting that kind of service from what is easily the most expensive shared hosting account I have ever seen. What sort of website do you host there? What other options have you considered? Have you tried contacting their support for an explanation?

  3. #3
    I'm shocked to, it's unbelievable, Rackspace slogan for "Cloud Sites" service is:

    rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/sites

    It's web hosting without the hassles of managing a dedicated server or the poor performance common with shared hosting.
    And I made my choice based on its brand popularity and this. I have a Drupal site with a medium traffic. I believe this problem does not come from my site traffic, it happens mostly during pick time and the lack of its resources to support the clients websites.

    I had a dedicated server, but because I had to spend lots of time to manage it I decided to use a scalable cloud hosting to use my time more efficiently. But this problem is proving I made a mistake.

    Yes I have contacted them and each time they answer: "We have a problem with your cluster and one of our technician is working on it."

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    search.php?do=getnew
    Posts
    1,241
    How long has the website been down and how often does it happen?

  5. #5
    It happen periodically during pick time. It's not a persist problem.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Location
    United States
    Posts
    1,182
    RackSpace cloud has had issues for people. No cloud beats a good configured dedicated server performance. Cloud has to much fluff and doesn't compare in performance with dedicated servers and server clusters in my opinion...
    www.opticip.com - Optic IP LLC

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by DMEHosting View Post
    RackSpace cloud has had issues for people. No cloud beats a good configured dedicated server performance. Cloud has to much fluff and doesn't compare in performance with dedicated servers and server clusters in my opinion...
    Your opinion is valid in WHT speak but to use it to validate all clouds is false. To be honest the "cloud" industry has a real problem in the service and support of today. Plenty of companies built "clouds" but did not architect them well. We all hope Rackspace responds here and fixes this customer's issues with their cloud platform.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Location
    United States
    Posts
    1,182
    Quote Originally Posted by RossH View Post
    Your opinion is valid in WHT speak but to use it to validate all clouds is false. To be honest the "cloud" industry has a real problem in the service and support of today. Plenty of companies built "clouds" but did not architect them well. We all hope Rackspace responds here and fixes this customer's issues with their cloud platform.
    I'm mainly targeting Shared Clouds. Private Clouds are much better since it's tightly controlled. It's hard to design a shared cloud to please all customers and to perform for all the different types of clients you would get, as no client will have the same requirements (usually). From what I can see, you face the same risks going with a shared cloud provider, than you would with a budget VPS provider. A month or two ago, someone said that Rackspace emailed them with new VM details....telling him his old cloud VM was destroyed, complete data loss.
    www.opticip.com - Optic IP LLC

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by DMEHosting View Post
    I'm mainly targeting Shared Clouds. Private Clouds are much better since it's tightly controlled. It's hard to design a shared cloud to please all customers and to perform for all the different types of clients you would get, as no client will have the same requirements (usually). From what I can see, you face the same risks going with a shared cloud provider, than you would with a budget VPS provider. A month or two ago, someone said that Rackspace emailed them with new VM details....telling him his old cloud VM was destroyed, complete data loss.
    Shared clouds are not the issue as they are the same IaaS that Private Clouds are built off of. No one can build a product that pleases all customers of today. Data loss is truly linked to the amount of dollars you are willing to spend with your cloud. For example buying a single dedicated server is no different than buying a cloud server on dedicated hardware without backups. In the end it is all what the customer is willing to spend for their service, cloud does not give them magical hardware/uptime.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    London, UK
    Posts
    1,765
    There do seem to be a lot of limitations with Rackspace's Cloud Sites service compared to even normal shared hosting (no SSH, no unzipping without raising a support ticket, no EV SSL or any SSL that is not from a specific root...) - but that wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't 5x-10x the price whilst also having reliability issues.

    If you site has a fairly static/predictable level of traffic (or growing slowly) then perhaps a managed virtual dedicated server might be more suitable for your requirements. Cloud sites or scalable shared hosting platforms tend to be better for websites that have unpredictable traffic requirements, or very peaky traffic - e.g. a sports forum that is very busy on match days but quiet for the rest of the week might benefit from this type of hosting.
    Darren Lingham - Stablepoint Hosting
    Stablepoint - Cloud Web Hosting without compromise
    We provide industry-leading cPanel™ web hosting in 80+ global cities.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by dazmanultra View Post
    If you site has a fairly static/predictable level of traffic (or growing slowly) then perhaps a managed virtual dedicated server might be more suitable for your requirements. Cloud sites or scalable shared hosting platforms tend to be better for websites that have unpredictable traffic requirements, or very peaky traffic - e.g. a sports forum that is very busy on match days but quiet for the rest of the week might benefit from this type of hosting.
    Thanks for your advices, RackSpace Cloud Sites is really good during off pick time. It hosts more than 2900 other site on my cloud cluster according to domaintools:

    http://www.domaintools.com/research/...98.129.229.184

    As result during pick time, sites loading speed become really awful or it shows that message.

    As I said earlier, I had a reliable dedicated server and I didn't have any problem with it. But I'm one person with many tasks to do, besides I can't afford hiring some one to manage my dedicated server. That's why I decided to change my plan to scalable cloud hosting. But it seems I should change my plan again.

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Posts
    156
    Unfortunately some very famous companies have low quality servers and services. I had the same experience with another companies too and after moving to another less famous company, the problem is solved.
    I Love WebhostingTalk... zendegiyesabz

  13. #13
    I specifically asked about that issue here, I've pasted the Rackspace response below:
    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=986023


    Quote:
    1) Are they still battling the "Node Not Available" issues?

    In short, no...this isn't a specific system "issue" so to speak, let me explain. Our load balancers have a timeout on connections of 30 seconds and this issue most often arises when customers have extremely un-optiomized app code or DB queries that exceed this threshold. Overall, this is fairly rare for customers to experience, but it does happen, and when it does we are more than happy to help diagnose the issue and sometimes help resolve as well. Optimizing a DB can be fairly simple sometimes and this more often than not makes this issue disappear. Bad code is another story though unfortunately.

  14. #14
    First time I faced that problem and I spoke with its support department, they exactly say what you mentioned. While for the second time they said, they had problem with their cloud cluster...

    Moreover at first time they didn't answer clearly, when I mentioned I use Drupal CMS which has all standards necessary and AFAIK there is no un-optimized code in Drupal core.

    Besides the site I was talking about has a very simple Drupal installation that uses just Drupal core modules and I'm sure I was the only visitor on that time.

    During pick time (not my site pick time) loading takes so long and periodically it shows "Node Not Available". I have one simple question, why this problem occurs just during pick time?

  15. #15
    @Macadmia,

    I can't apologize enough for the trouble you've had the frustrations you experienced trying to figure out what was going on. This is certainly not the type of user experience we ever want to see.

    @Jpminus mentions a good point above about DB queries and unoptimized code that can time out (this is almost always the reason for the timeout), but if that is not the case for your site, I'd like to invite you to speak with my team so we can take a closer look at the site(s) you're hosting and figure out why you had this issue.

    Please feel free to email me at mw @ rackspace . com or call me directly at 210-312-5464.

    I look forward to helping!

    <<Signature to be setup in your profile>>
    Last edited by anon-e-mouse; 04-20-2011 at 05:32 PM.

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 16
    Last Post: 05-16-2011, 05:20 AM
  2. Rackspace Cloud Review
    By Richboos in forum Cloud Hosting
    Replies: 16
    Last Post: 01-30-2011, 05:02 PM
  3. Interesting Rackspace cloud review
    By Shannara in forum Cloud Hosting
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 11-09-2010, 12:53 PM
  4. Rackspace Cloud Review
    By Unleash in forum Web Hosting
    Replies: 15
    Last Post: 10-20-2009, 02:40 AM
  5. Rackspace Cloud Servers Review
    By nytrokiss in forum VPS Hosting
    Replies: 8
    Last Post: 05-06-2009, 07:45 AM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •