
Rackspace launches “Fanatical Support for Developers” - VanL
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-launches-fantatical-support-for-developers
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jnoller
See also the official announcement here:
[http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-developer-support-
fa...](http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-developer-support-fanatical-
support-for-your-code/)

Disclaimer: I am a Developer & Community Advocate for Rackspace; this means
they pay me to serve developers and engage the hacker and developer community.
This means that fundamentally - I serve you.

Any questions you may have, or criticisms, or better yet - suggestions to make
Rackspace Cloud / OpenStack more developer friendly and supportive: let me
know.

~~~
cnp
Does Rackspace provide no Node support? That's very surprising.

~~~
kenperkins
Full Disclosure: I'm the lead node.js developer advocate for Rackspace

As it turns out, we're announcing our node.js SDK plans (with support) today:

<http://devops.rackspace.com/pkgcloud-update.html>

~~~
cnp
Awesome, this is great news.

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rubyn00bie
Too little too late?

I find this hard to believe-- as a current Rackspace customer (I'd kill to
switch) I can say I've had nothing but horrible customer support. Save, one
guy named Mark Lessel-- who is a fucking boss (had to give him props).

But I only get to someone like mark, once I've gotten so fed up, I start being
an asshole and then, only then, does anything get done (they send Mark to help
me). I don't like being an asshole, but spending 3 days going back and forth
before getting a resolution is too much.

They've too often had people without technical ability (or it so it seems)
attempt to assist me, then blow me off because they don't understand the true
nature of the problem.

They say you can "move a slider" and increase the size of your VPS. Which
couldn't be further from the truth; more often than not you have to get on the
line with their support to figure out why the instance failed to build. Only
to drag it out for another 30 minutes telling you to wait; before actually
investigating the god damn problem.... Makes scaling quickly very easy
(sarcasm).

Rackspace is made even worse by the outright lies about their 'fanatical
customer support.' Biggest bullshit marketing lie from a, somewhat
respectable, tech company I've seen. If they just advertised middle of the
road support and service, I think I'd be less upset. It's just the lies that
get to me. Don't over promise and under deliver, that's a bait and switch.

Maybe they should start giving away lipstick with every VPS; so we can all
look pretty while we get fucked ;-)

~~~
drfritznunkie
I have to agree with you rubynOObie. My former company was a big Rackspace
customer, over 8? years, in their top tier dedicated environment (Intensive or
somesuch they called it). I too really wanted to believe in their "Fanatical
Support", primarily because we were shelling out $$k+/mo, but there were way
too many mistakes on their side to ever believe it. If they couldn't do it
with hardware/OS support, why would I believe they could do it with complex
application support?

Our relationship became so toxic that they flew me down to SA for some
customer appreciation event. Which oddly enough, was about 50% new happy
customers, and 50% disgruntled existing customers. And boy was my experience
with their support reinforced repeatedly by the others...

Not to mention I went through more than dozen "dedicated" account teams. They
were all so earnest at first, but by the time I left, I had basically scripted
the conversation for a new account team, pointing out all the custom things on
our account and with our configuration that they absolutely couldn't mess with
under penalty of death.

Their dedicated pricing is non-competitive these days... I think they rely on
the fact that once you're past a certain size, moving to another provider
would be so painful that you'll happily pay their ridiculous rates.

~~~
exiquio
In our (Rackspace) defense I will say that we definitely don't rely on a
customer getting bigger and being stuck with us as a result due to migration
pains. I can demonstrate that logically if you will follow:

Surely this audience is aware of OpenStack and our commitment to such having
open source the first major components a few years ago. With such knowledge
you can logically assume that we want to be interoperable with other
companies' offerings on the same platform.

We really believe in this "fanatical support" thing and we believe we can
compete with others on a fair playing field because of it. We do this in part
by paying attention:

If our support fails in areas and it's made public in places like this
website, trust we are reading about it and discussing it at various levels.
Furthermore, we are always striving to get it right. Take that from someone
who isn't paid to read this, but paid to write software.

FTR, these are my opinions as someone in the Rackspace culture. Take it for
what its worth.

Tell us what we suck at so we can do it better (like you did, drfritznunkie).
Thanks.

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jebblue
If they get away from utility pricing and go flat like Linode then that might
be interesting. It's the same reason I don't use AWS, nickel and diming
practices.

~~~
hkmurakami
I wonder what the logistics and financial realities look like for a company
that has become as big as Rackspace.

Rackspace and Amazon do this "nickel and diming" and they share the common
trait of being rather large, high overhead organizations. On the other hand,
places like DigitalOcean or Linode appear to be smaller places that try to
keep their overhead as low as possible.

~~~
jebblue
I see what you're saying but without being indelicate, their overhead isn't
mine.

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bjudson
This is a real weak spot for companies like Google and Amazon, which have very
little experience delivering quality tech support. Rackspace is playing catch
up on the technical side, but they really understand support. It goes a long
way.

~~~
jnoller
Some people may see "Fanatical Support" and cringe at it as marketing: it's
really not. It's a company core value, and baked into the DNA of every person
in the company from HR, to IT, support, engineering - customers, developers,
etc are not just revenue - they're our _family and friends_.

Fanatical support is what makes Rackspace, well - Rackspace.

~~~
hkmurakami
That's really reminiscent of Zappos. I don't know how their service first
attitude was taken at first, but I think over the years we've accepted it as a
genuine thing.

~~~
ephur
Racker here, joined about five years ago. Spent some of that time in direct
support roles and one of the things that we did was take a trip to Zappos,
participate in their culture program. Routinely we would engage with other
companies who we believed to be providing great service and find if there were
ideas we could apply to our own product. Fanatical Support is home grown, but
we definitely look to others in the industry who are doing it right.

