A2 Hosting vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
A2 Hosting
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
A2 Hosting in Ann Arbor provides business website hosting, featuring free site migration, unlimited SSD, isolated dedicated servers, and related features.N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Best Alternatives
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
AccuWebHosting.Com
AccuWebHosting.Com
Score 9.9 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
1.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.0
(0 ratings)
2.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
1.0
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
1.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
if you're looking for a somewhat cheap web host but don't care about uptime, outages or decent technical support then A2 is ideal
Read full review
I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.
Read full review
Pros
  • the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price
Read full review
  • Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
  • Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
Read full review
Cons
  • technical support
  • quality control
  • escalating issues to management when needed
  • customer service communication
  • training their tech support team
Read full review
  • Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
  • The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
  • The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
  • There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.
Read full review
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
Read full review
Usability
[In my opinion] it barely works.
Read full review
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
they are only technically available but having someone say hello, i'm here to help, immediately is not real responsive if they actually never address the issue being reported. we don't contact support for the bland greeting, we are actually trying to solve a business process interruption
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Performance
They are only good if you never update your website and i mean never. Otherwise their main performance diffrentiator is turbo web hosting, their highest shared hosting plan. When caching is working it performs well reducing load times by half, but as soon as you add a new page to the site, the updates don't show up until you clear the cache manually from multiple locations (wordpress a2optimized plugin, cpanel etc..). As they make updates to the turbo hosting A2optimized plugin, they do not test them properly and do not handle customer feedback about them, instead they are in denial and try to immediately convince the customer there is no issue at all! the old developer joke when they don't want to fix feedback: it works on my machine!
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
[In my opinion] they have the worst customer support. It's awful. [I feel like] they talk over you [and] they blame anything but what is real. [It makes me think] they are uneducated. [When I dealt with them] they never answered why things went wrong. [I feel like] they are nightmares and just hard to deal with. And, [from my experience] they are NOT nice. [I felt like] they act condescending in conversations. They waste so much time over nothing.
Read full review
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
Read full review
Implementation Rating
[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
No answers on this topic
Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support. We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers. We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider. Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available). We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system. Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.
Read full review
Scalability
I believe they do not care about addressing failures when they occur. Starting out with a working service counts for nothing if you can't maintain it, fix issues when reported, and actually take the extra step to prevent them from happening again. You have to care about quality and customer service, and A2 couldn't care less
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • they are adequate for a startup looking for cheap site hosting but unreliable for anything beyond
Read full review
  • We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
  • We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
  • A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.
Read full review
ScreenShots