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Rackspace Managed Hosting

Score1 out of 10

63 Reviews and Ratings

What is Rackspace Managed Hosting?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

In my opinion, Rackspace fell flat on their face - Terrible incident response

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Rackspace Managed Hosting to host a Microsoft Exchange email server.

Pros

  • Good online user interface
  • Up until this latest incident - 12/2/2022 - provided relative quick customer support

Cons

  • Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned.
  • Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers
  • In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace.
  • In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services

Most Important Features

  • In my opinion, nothing at this point - environment is non-existent

Return on Investment

  • I feel Rackspace is working to destroy my woman-owned small business.
  • In my opinion, the worst business decision I've made is to use their services.

Business email crippled while we waited a MONTH for support

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We moved my company’s six email accounts to Rackspace Managed Hosting two months ago.

Cons

  • Support took FOUR WEEKS to fix a bad problem
  • Many sent emails were never received, but not bounced
  • In my experience, clueless chat and phone support

Most Important Features

  • Email
  • Downtime

Return on Investment

  • Rackspace Managed Hosting cost us DAYS of lost time
  • Unsure how many customers were lost when they never received our email
  • We left Rackspace Managed Hosting as fast as we could

Alternatives Considered

Fastmail

Cloud server hosting made easy

Pros

  • It's easy to spin up new cloud instances.
  • Creating backup images is easy.

Cons

  • Their backup tools are confusing and could use some clarification. We ended up getting charged for backup licenses on nonexistent servers, and that was frustrating because they would not refund us the fees as they declared it our fault for misunderstanding their terms.
  • They need to stop charging for "fanatical" support. Their support service has gotten worse over the years and now they are charging us a monthly fee. It's enough of a rub that we'll most likely move our servers to a different company.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers

Other Software Used

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers, IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

Rackspace hits the sweet spot between price, reliability, and usability.

Pros

  • OpenStack
  • Support
  • DNS
  • AutoSaving

Cons

  • Lack of features compared to other clouds
  • More support for tools that expose the API to end users like ansible and terraform
  • The workflow can sometimes be buggy.

Most Important Features

  • OpenStack hosting
  • Great support
  • Low costs

Return on Investment

  • Lowered costs compared to other cloud providers
  • Had an unexpected knowledge gap cost
  • Had an unexpected DRY payoff with hybrid cloud infrastructure

Alternatives Considered

AWS Auto Scaling, Azure DNS, Azure Virtual Machines, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes

Usability

Rackspace - Pretty Good, I Think!

Pros

  • Great and responsive service
  • Good up time, almost no occurrences of website downtime
  • Flexible with the requirements of the business

Cons

  • Work to best practices, at times clunky
  • Not the cheapest...
  • Very technical, at times advisers find it difficult to "dumb down" their questions regarding services you're requesting

Return on Investment

  • Responded to slowdowns very quickly, therefore negating lose of earnings at peak times
  • When speaking to the right people eventually, they suggested solutions that have improved server response, which should have a positive impact on site speed (and so CR)
  • Load balancing allows for an efficient workflow in implementing new features while not losing traffic
  • Originally set some configurations low, which negatively impacted server performance. This was rectified with memory expansion following some discussions.

Alternatives Considered

SiteGround Web Hosting

Other Software Used

Adobe Illustrator CC, Visual Studio IDE, Qubit