RackSpace: Can Anyone Match Their Service & Support...
Jan 12, 2006
We need a MANAGED dedicated server for a client we are developing a website for. They will do most of their sales online.
Here is what we have found: As far as a managed dedicated server, the BEST company we have found that offers 24/7/365 phone support and has their own in-house hardware tech staff is RackSpace.
However, RackSpace is a little pricey (starts at around $400/month).
Is there any other REPUTABLE company available that offers MANAGED DEDICATED SERVERS WITH 24/7/365 phone support and in-house hardware tech support at a better price? Everytime I call RackSpace, I get a human being on the phone...NEVER an answering machine.
We want to put our client's website in the best hands possible.
With that said, are their any suggestions at a better price that match the support of RackSpace?
Thank you VERY MUCH for your helpful insight. We need to launch the site in a couple of weeks.
There is a new page on Rackspace's website where they are offering to match the price of any hosting company that sells the same package of specifications. It sounds like there will be no compromise on the standards of service included in the deal.
Rackspace Ticket support is terrible. They have let me down three times already in 3 different separate occasions. If I had known they were this bad I would have never had signed a 24 month contract with them. If you want up time go with rackspace, if you want service...well go somewhere else.
My server has been down for over 4 hours now. They have site URL monitoring service however that doesn't do any good. All it does is inform you that your website is down...they don't actually try to fix the situation! So I sent them a ticket right away. About 3 hours later I have not gotten an update so I call them. After a couple of minutes they tell me it is a ddos attack and they can't help me. They banned a couple ip addresses if you call that help.
Now I am requesting more information from them and probably won't get a response until the morning. Total down time is 4 hours and 55 Minutes and counting...
My server with rackspace has been down for 5+ hours today. At 13:04 they informed me "Upon investigation it appears that MySQL is reaching its connections limit."
An hour later they tell me to " remove the mysql_pconnect calls it should help reduce your mysql connection usage fairly significantly". I have managed hosting and they are telling me to do things I don't know how to do. I reply back asking them if they can remove the "mysql_pconnect"
15:07:55 Another two hours pass and my server is still down and Rackspace has not responded or updated the ticket. I decide to send them 3 more replies several minutes apart). Rackspace finally responds saying they are "investigating the issue now" and will shut down MySQL. Is this the FANATICAL SERVICE they are known for? Not sure what they were doing for first 2 hours maybe a lunch break?
An hour and half later they update the ticket (16:25:48) and say they are still working on the issue. (Very nice of them to update me)
17:14:21 They update ticket again and NOW realize that my server is being ddosed and are working on the issue.
I am paying such a premium price for hosting yet the service I am receiving is terrible. I have never seen such a lazy hosting provider taking hours to respond and update tickets. In the past Rackspace informed me they can't always update the ticket because they are working on the issue but when I don't keep ontop of them nothing gets done.
When buying a server from big companies like IBM, HP and DELL, you can buy on-site support within 4 hours. Does it mean they go to your datacenter and fix your server within 4 hours or is it that they will do an on-site diagnostic within 4 hours and fix the server later? Do the technician bring spare parts with him or does he needs to order them later?
I've been with them for over 5 years now, but have almost completely lost patience. Since they offer no public feedback, and only rarely update their network status page with actual server problems, I thought it would only be fair to document some of my recent problems publically. My main issues recently have been:
1. Lack of technical support by telephone. They maintain they offer telephone support, and have an option for it on their automated phone system, but every option goes to the owners wife - who is non technical, and gives the response "the technicians are on the other line" every single time! I've challened this, and they maintain telephone support is available, even though it isn't. When I bought my package with reyaltec (most expensive reseller package they offer) they DID offer phone support and MSN support, which has also now ceased. For me, telephone support is paramount, which is part of the reason I chose to host with them.
2. They have had problems with an old server recently, and rather than migrating the server to new hardware whilst the going was good (they said somebody got "half way through it" before he left the company!?) they have waited until the server crashed and became completely unstable. No apology, just a casual 'yeah, we should have done it sooner really' attitude. In migrating to new hardware, all of my clients websites have been down numerous times over the past 3 days, and some of my clients have lost significant amounts of email over 3 days. At least one client has also had website files go missing. I think this is completely unacceptable.
3. My clients and I seem to be their monitoring service. Whenever their servers go down I seem to be alerting them to the issue via my angry clients, which had gone un-noticed. They persist in defending their network monitoring services, although to me they seem useless (e.g. this morning, email was down again for an hour, but reyaltec were unaware until I pointed it out and they restarted the server).
4. I have not had a package upgrade once in over 5 years.
5. The price has become uncompetitive compared to my other providers.
In short, I understand Reyaltec are a small, family business, but their standards have sunk to such levels that I have lost all faith in their service and integrity as a company. They seem to defend their sloppy practices as though standard (is it standard for people to lose 3 days worth of email during a server upgrade!?) offering no sign of remorse or compensation for the major problems faced by their customers. The only real comment on these issues when I've raised them several times in the past is that 'things are improving' which they don't appear to be.
I am looking to move providers, but I host around 40 domains on their shared packages, so it's a lengthy task. Some of the domains also have MSSQL databases, which reyaltec charge to detach should I need to move them to a new provider, so this would be both expensive and time-consuming. At the risk of losing more clients though it's something I will probably need to do.
I'm interested in other people's views on the company. I used to recommend them, but now recommend against them!
i have been hosting as a reseller with gazzin.com on their windows servers for past some years and in this period i suppose they have shifted their datacenter more than twice causing a great problem to me and all my clients.
the latest period of the shift being going on currently i request you all to go through the transcript below which i had with their support center. when we talk about a refund for this downtime i suppose the owner 'PAUL' just stops responding ......
mod_security: Access denied with code 406. Pattern match "<[[pace:]]*(script|about|applet|activex|chrome)*>.*(script|about|applet|activex|chrome)[[pace:]]*>" at POST_PAYLOAD [hostname "domain.us"] [uri "/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.exe"]
# Only accept request encodings we know how to handle # we exclude GET requests from this because some (automated) # clients supply "text/html" as Content-Type SecFilterSelective REQUEST_METHOD "!^(GET|HEAD|POST|PUT|PROPFIND|OPTIONS)$" "chain,id:340001,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'Restricted HTTP function'" SecFilterSelective HTTP_Content-Type "!(^$|^application/x-www-form-urlencoded$|^multipart/form-data)"
#Generic rule for allowed characters, very broken at the moment, dont use it unless you can fix it #Then post your fix eh! #SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI "!^[-a-zA-z0-9.+_/-?=]+$" "chain,id:340002,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'Restricted HTTP character set'"
# Require Content-Length to be provided with # every POST request SecFilterSelective REQUEST_METHOD "^POST$" "chain,id:340003,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'Content Length not provided with POST'" SecFilterSelective HTTP_Content-Length "^$"
# Don't accept transfer encodings we know we don't handle # (and you don't need it anyway) SecFilterSelective HTTP_Transfer-Encoding "!^$" "id:340004,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'Dis-allowed Transfer Encoding'"
#XSS insertion into Content-Type SecFilterSelective THE_REQUEST "Content-Type:.*(<[[:space:]]*(script|about|applet|activex|chrome)*>.*(script|about|applet|activex|chrome)[[:space:]]*>|onmouseover=|javascript:)" "id:300002,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'XSS attack in Content-type header'"
#Don't accept chunked encodings #modsecurity can not look at these, so this is a hole #that can bypass your rules, the rule before this one #should cover this, but hey paranoia is cheap SecFilterSelective HTTP_Transfer-Encoding "chunked" "id:300003,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'Chunked Transfer Encoding denied'"
#Code injection via content length SecFilterSelective HTTP_Content-Length ";(system|passthru|exec)(" "id:330003,rev:1,severity:2,msg:'Code Injection in Content-Length header'"
#broad cross site scripting rule #False alarms are a problem with this, use with caution #SecFilterSelective THE_REQUEST "<(.| )+>"
I have two similar VPS plans with identical software setups. I installed APF Firewall on VPS A, modified the conf.apf file to change the interfaces to venet0 and set monokern to 1 and then opened all the ingress ports required. Started the firewall with 'service apf start' and everything went fine, and everything is working fine with no errors.
I did the same on VPS B but when I start apf I get the following error that reoccurs during the startup sequence:
iptables: No chain/target/match by that name
While the firewall does seem to be running (by checking iptables -L) I am unable to download files on the VPS, via wget or yum ...
After downloading httpd-2.2.29-win32.zip and generating SHA1 and SHA256 checksums from the file, they do not match the checksums posted on the download page.
Taken from apache error logs, are these below legit or false alarms per se? This same customer is having issues with php sendmail (server uses php 5 w/ phpsuexec enabled)
[Thu Feb 21 17:02:02 2008] [error] [client 216.9.250.112] mod_security: Access denied with code 406. Pattern match "!^[0-9a-z]*$" at COOKIE("PHPSESSID") [hostname "www.clientdomain.com"] [uri "/%23URL.ImagURL%23"]
[Fri Feb 22 10:13:18 2008] [error] [client 189.24.155.203] mod_security: Access denied with code 406. Pattern match "',''));" at POST_PAYLOAD [hostname "clientdomain.com"] [uri "/xmlrpc.php"] ....
OS = CentOS 6.5 (Final) Plesk version = 12.0.18 Update #7, last updated at July 11, 2014 12:46 PM
I have been trying to make my sites better suited to anti spam measures. The only warning I have left to work out is:
Warning - Reverse DNS does not match SMTP Banner
In the Plesk settings i do have the outgoing mail setting set to Send from domain IP addresses and use domain names in SMTP greeting - still I get the warning.
I am using Post fix. This is a 1and1 dedicated server and I am using custom name servers for this domain. I believe the smtp banner is matching the main ip and not the domain.
I am using the following mod_rewrite rule for shortened SEO friendly links: RewriteRule ^blog/([^/]*).html$ /blog/blog.php?pid=$1 [R=301,L]
For Google SEO reasons, will the shortened rewritten link created from above be the permanent link, from the R=301? Even though the longer link is still functional? Or, do I need to create a rewrite match 301 rule to push the long URL to the shortened URL permanently?
Rackspace provides great uptime, however their ticket service is terrible. It takes them 3-4 hours to respond to normal tickets and 1-2 hours to respond to emergency tickets. If it's a real emergency they ask you to call them but when you call them the person never finishes what they are suppose to do. The person starts and then goes to dinner or their shift ends and nothing gets done.
Well I learned my lesson before and decided to call them instead of submitting a ticket. So I called them tonight at 6PM to tell them my website was hacked. The guy on the phone said it looked like it was a mysql injection. He said would remove some things and ask for a restore and I said okay fine and hung up. An hour passed and didn't receive an update via phone call or ticket. Where did this guy go? Well his shift probably ended. No sense in calling again since it won't leave a trail...
So I submit an emergency ticket on 2008-05-18 19:24:39 No response until 22:05:07 they apologized for the extreme delay and said restore was starting.
Here it is 23:03:25 and my website still isn't restored.
This has happened to me 3 times already and it takes rackspace around 5-6 hours to do a simple restore (I have the support tickets to prove it).
I would understand if it was a crappy hosting company..but I am paying close to $500 a month for a server and expect better service. Does this happen to anyone else or am I an exception to the rule. It's been 4 hr 22 min since I first submitted a ticket and around 5.5 hours since I first called them and my website still isn't restored properly...
I bought a server with RackSpace, for the network, support, quality, and other reasons.
Anyways I am starting up a new VPS division, and thought why settle for the rest when you can have the best. Because there is all of these "budget providers" out there that use cogent, and dual or quad core servers.
So I thought that if I bought the best server I could, with the option to keep upgrading (off peak hours of course). With premium bandwidth, and still be competitive why not?
The server that I bought through RackSpace is below.
Dell PowerEdge 2950 III Dual Processor, Quad Core Intel Xeon L5335 8 GB Memory (Fully Buffered) 4 x 146 GB (10k RPM) 2.5" SAS Drive(s), Raid 5 Unlimited Data Backup 100 Mbit Dedicated Port 80 IPs
Like I said I will upgrade that server when it gets time, because it could still use some tweaks. Also after this, me and RackSpace where talking about a cluster, but I don't know how that will work out, I think that it would be nice if it didn't pose any problems. And also load balancing.
But anyways I have not received the server as of yet, and I was wondering if anyone could give me your opinions. As this is my first time, and want to make sure that i am going about everything correctly.
I also have hired 3 admins, just for this venture, that have alot of knowledge with VPS nodes.
Also we where wanting to use virtuozzo , but they don't sell it. Would you recommend VMWare, or HyperVM?
I need to obtain a qutoa for a hosting from 3 hosting company (this is a project for a state goverment so you guys know the drill). I am contacting Rack space, who else on that level I should contact.
About a month ago I switched from Virtual Private Hosting on ************ to dedicated hosting on RackSpace. It was definitely an improvement, but I'm still dissatisfied.
Here are painful parts of my experience with RackSpace:
1) RackSpace wanted me to sign paper contract (************ didn't require that). That paperwork took almost a day (several hours of my efforts + some wait time). Sales guy couldn't open several versions of "Microsoft Office Image Writer" that I emailed to him, so I had to resend the document in different format.
2) It is a little unpleasant to deal with RackSpace sales guys. They forget (or "forget") to answer some of my questions; use some slightly unpleasant pushy sales techniques. Is it typical for any sales reps, not only RackSpace's sales?
3) After the contract was signed, it took RackSpace almost 4 days to install the server. I signed the contract Wednesday July 3rd 2008 and was hoping that on Saturday-Sunday night I'll be able to move my web site (postjobfree.com) to RackSpace. But RackSpace set up my server only on Monday - not convenient time for me and my users to do the move.
4) RackSpace promised me that they would help with the migration. They gave some tips, but not all of them were good. For example, they suggested me to shut down my web site for few hours while I will copy my database. Not a good approach for 24/7 service. So, basically I was mostly left on my own with the migration.
Fortunately, I used advise of Omar Al Zabir about smooth web hosting migration: http ://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/archive/2006/08/27/110061.aspx
Ironically - it was Omar's recommendation to use RackSpace for web hosting that made me pick them.
5) Average response to my ticket requests is about few hours (2-3 may be?). Sometimes ticket response time is shorter; sometimes it's longer (up to a day or even more in some cases). It's an improvement in comparison with ************, but is that really the best in hosting industry?
6) Most of the time responses are good, ...............
I have a Server with Centos7 + Plesk 12 and in the service configuration say that the Bind service is not installed, from command line i have install named services and make a manual configuration the first domain, but when I return to the service page in plesk... the problem is the same, the Bind Service is not installed; then the problem is when i want create a new hosting i need to go to the ssh to make the DNS configuration...
Got following Problem: Unable to find service node for web service on domain with id = 0
After a Check from [URL] ....
I tried this: [URL] ....
Result:
+--------------------+--------------+---------------------------------------+------------------------------+------------+ | Domains | Service Type | IpAddressesCollections.ipCollectionId | Current value of ipAddressId | Have to be | +--------------------+--------------+---------------------------------------+------------------------------+------------+ | XXXXXXXXXXXXX.org | mail | 30 | 0 | 1 | +--------------------+--------------+---------------------------------------+------------------------------+------------+
Resolution:
mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -Dpsa -e 'Update IpAddressesCollections SET ipAddressId = 1 WHERE ipCollectionId = 30'
Result: ERROR 1062 (23000) at line 1: Duplicate entry '30-0' for key 'PRIMARY'
Deleted a domain workspace in Parallels Plesk and now I am getting this error when signing into the panel:Looked at the logs and been trying multiple commands (including the bootstrapper repair etc.)I found the full error from the logs:
[13-Jun-2015 16:35:33 UTC] PleskDBException: Unable to find service node for web service on domain with id=6 file: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/PhDomain.php line: 1404 code: 0 trace: #0 /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/Smb/Subscription/Domain.php(490): PhDomain->getWebHostingServiceNode()
After deleting a domain, we got the following error which rendered the panel useless.
Internal error: Unable to find service node for web service on domain with id=5 Message Unable to find service node for web service on domain with id=5 File PhDomain.php Line 1402 Type PleskDBException Go To Previous Page
