

Disappointing Experience with Rackspace - cjy
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2011/03/why-signing-up-with-rackspace-was-a-disappointing-experience.html

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maratd
The author is chronically unhappy with everything (apparently Amazon EC2 also
sucks). Complexity of the password for his account? A checkbox? Really?

Rackspace is a great company with strong ties to developing open source
software. They are reliable and professional. Amazon EC2 is also an excellent
service. I use both.

~~~
petewarden
I'm actually overjoyed to be living in a world where companies like Rackspace
and Amazon are possible, it still blows my mind that I can rent a hundred
machine cluster for $10 an hour.

I wrote up the article at the end of a long and frustrating day, and looking
back on it, the tone's all wrong. I still stand by the content, but it needs
way more context and the equivalent of smileys surrounding it.

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lazyant
Amazon´s bar has ruined the Internet for the rest of businesses. Now if you
have to make one click too many or wait a minute there's going to be a blog
post about it.

I'm just amazed that if I'm thirsty I touch something and I get instant water
and if I'm cold I touch something and quickly it gets warmer. I enjoy things
like these every day that only three or four generations ago not even kings
had.

~~~
JCB_K
_Amazon´s bar has ruined the Internet for the rest of businesses. Now if you
have to make one click too many or wait a minute there's going to be a blog
post about it._

Oh no! The Internet is getting better, more user-friendly! It's terrible, it's
a disaster! /sarcasm.

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clavalle
I had an interesting conversation with Rackspace this week that I found pretty
amusing.

My company is putting together a project that will ramp up to around $3
million / yr in hosting costs, give or take, within two years and continuing
on for the winning hosting provider indefinitely. It is a bit of a surprise
contract so we are in a big hurry to get a third of that capacity up ASAP. We
have several options and Rackspace /was/ near the top of the list.

So I am in a meeting with someone from their engineering staff, a sales guy,
our lead operations engineer and our top sales guy.

So our sales guy, doing his job, asks their sales guy "Is there anything else
you can do for us." (referring to price) "I mean this deal is worth about $3
million/year" and the Rackspace sales guy replies "Well we are a $700 million
dollar a year company so no, we do these kinds of deals all of the time."

I was floored...My immediate thought was "Well, I guess you won't be a 703
million dollar a year company."

~~~
lsc
if you have that kind of scratch to throw at the problem, why are you not
buying your own hardware?

I mean, outsourcing is great if you need to scale up fast, but if you are at
that kind of scale, you will quickly save a lot of money if you can move some
of your longer-term load off to your own hardware. Your monthly cost is going
to be a rather large fraction of the capital cost of the hardware, and
difference between the capital cost of harware+co-lo fees and what an
outsourced server rental will charge at that scale is more than enough to
amortize out the cost of a good sysadmin and a hardware grunt or two.

~~~
clavalle
We are definitely exploring this option but it will have to wait until after
we ramp up because we have to do it in such a hurry.

Not only that but I'd like to stay out of the hardware business as much as
possible. If we have to pay a premium to do so we have to pay a
premium...depending, of course, on the size of the premium.

We've fallen into the trap before of "We can do this. We'll just roll our own
and save some cash." It has, without fail, ended up being more trouble than it
is worth. Granted, that was on a much smaller scale so its not like we were
hiring people just to handle that aspect (at first) but there is a lot to be
said for focusing on core competencies and ours is software.

My first concern, funny enough, was not the cost but the loss of
control...there is something almost aesthetically pleasing about owning the
whole stack. But, surprisingly, I've found that it feels like we are actually
more in control when I can pick up the phone and say "This is what I want
done." or "We are having a problem. Fix it." and not have to worry about "Is
this key person in my organization trying to help fix some hardware problem
when they should be working on 'x'?" etc, etc. And if the provider becomes too
much of a problem, we know we can always fall back to doing it ourselves.

~~~
lsc
>We are definitely exploring this option but it will have to wait until after
we ramp up because we have to do it in such a hurry.

yeah, that's the big advantage of outsourcing. I was just pointing out that
you should make sure you are aware of and okay with the premium you are paying
if you keep the outsourced stuff around for more than a few months.

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MNgeek
I have had a working relationship with Rackspace as a web developer and
reseller of hosting services for the past 18 months. I have yet to find a
competitor that can come close to meeting the high-level of customer service
that Rackspace has to offer. I am not sure that you complaints are worthy of
such harsh words. I would strongly encourage that you stick with them and see
how the relationship transpires. I an certain you will change your tune.

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adriand
They do have superb customer support though. I've been quite pleased with them
from that perspective.

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samuel1604
At least he got thought a real person at the end, for most VPS/Cloud provider
you never got this chance... That guy is seriously picky, I don't know why
people just chill and instead of complain just build awesome stuff...

