Over the past six months I've been battling with poor service from Rackspace, with hosts mysteriously dying and their agents are trying to upsell me (load balancers for a single server, for example). We're migrating away but this doesn't surprise me.
I recently had a very, very poor experience with them and their Managed AWS Cloud Services. I escalated and the sales rep stated "I'll share your feedback with leadership." Haven't heard another single word out of him. As you can imagine, their days as a vendor are numbered.
I've gotten the same recommendation from them. I complained because they pulled the network connection on the drive connected to the database and completely torched the drive. They were like: well maybe you should consider running multiple database machines with replication so you can survive the next time we screw things up.
I was told it was to avoid changing my DNS when I spun up a new server. With the load balancer being $50/month; that was the pitch that put me off Rackspace.
I don't know about the poster above, but commonly load balancers can be used to do SSL termination, which can significantly improve application performance.
I want add that their UI is awful too. Errors and slowness and their imaging system is constantly failing. We're testing out vultr for cost, speed and simplicity.
I was at RAX back in the early cloud days. The console has a long and sordid history. I was under the impression they bought CloudKick just to get the team to build a better console. Somewhat surprised it's still bad; somewhat not.
Thing is, their product has been inferior for years! You wouldn't believe how bad it used to be. The current state of rackspace cloud is great, compared to how it was in 2010.
