Review: Rackspace 5/10

I've been with Rackspace for about a year and a half, thought I'd share my experience. It was.... so-so.

Quick summary:
They try hard, but their techs don't seem to know what they're doing. I give them an "A" for effort and a "D+" for results.

Sales

The Rackspace sales process is tricky. They will quote a very high price for a very long contract, but it is negotiable. I got quotes from 3 places: Rackspace, InetU, and Datapipe. They were originally all about the same, but Rackspace negotiated down 30+%. I did agree to a 2-year contract, because I had heard lots of good things about Rackspace and didn't anticipate any problems, but in hindsight that was not a good idea. Ask yourself why they need you to sign such a long-term agreement... why are they so worried you'll want to leave, after all? In the future I'll avoid contracts longer than 12 months.

Hardware

Top-notch. I never had a problem. Not much else to say here.

Features / control panel

Rackspace has its own account management portal for things like billing, bandwidth graphs, support tickets, DNS, etc. It is quite good, intuitive and easy to use. One nice feature is the ability to manage multiple users on your account and give them different permissions.

One thing that could use some major improvement is the server monitoring system. "Rackwatch" as it's called is very limited. Most monitoring systems even at discount hosts have more advanced features. Rackwatch did not always catch website outages for us (even extended downtime), so I had to use an outside monitoring service. Also, Rackwatch gets turned off during scheduled and emergency maintenance, so if you want to know your real uptime, eg for SLA credits, you'll need outside monitoring.

Uptime/Network

Decent. The bandwidth is high quality. The only major problem we had with the network was last fall, when their entire datacenter went down several times over a few days due to a car accident outside. I won't rehash the details here since it was all over the Internet at the time. They did issue a credit for a small portion of the monthly fee that month. I think they had another major outage this winter, but it didn't affect our server.

Support

Rackspace has built their reputation on "fanatical support." They do try very hard, much harder than other hosts I have used, but I was not impressed by the level of technical knowledge. I had some problems in the beginning because they told me some wrong things about how their database backup software worked, which caused some crashes. Later, a technician logged into our server to install new managed backup software (without scheduling a maintenance window beforehand or notifying us), and managed to kill the ethernet and bring the whole system down. Rackwatch conveniently "missed" the outage but it showed up on our other monitoring service and we tracked down the cause in the server logs. I brought this up in a support ticket but it was ignored.

The good thing about Rackspace is that you can get them on the phone anytime, and they will respond quickly to support tickets -- Not necessarily with the right answer, but at least they respond quickly. I think that's basically what they mean by "fanatical".

Earlier this year Rackspace started upgrading its managed backup system, and that's when things really went downhill for us. First there was the issue with the Rackspace tech killing our server and then ignoring us. Then, we were having serious load issues for about a month. It caused major problems on our website and we were frantically trying to figure out what was wrong with our application for a couple weeks. Finally it turned out that it was caused by their new backup software hogging all the system resources during evening primetime. If we had a more experienced staff here, we probably could have figured that out relatively easily ourselves, but we don't -- that's what we're paying Rackspace thousands for. If they are going to make changes to the server like installing new backup software, it's up to them to make sure they don't destroy the system. We finally figured out what the problem was and mentioned it in a support ticket, but that ticket got ignored, too, and we gave up. Since Rackwatch couldn't detect the downtime (it just checks whether http is running, not whether it's actually serving up pages), they didn't recognize it as downtime for SLA purposes/credits.

We don't have time/desire to babysit our web host, so we decided in the end to move our server elsewhere. Now we regret the long-term contract, because we'll end up in collections if we don't cough up the several thousand dollars left on our term. If you ever do sign a long-term contract, I strongly recommend that you insist on a clause that lets you out of the contract if service is sub-par. I'm sure the "big guys" do this. We didn't think of it at the time we were negotiating, but wish we had.

Conclusion

Overall rating: 5/10
From what I've heard, this was not a typical experience with Rackspace -- most people seem to be pretty positive about them. We might have been unlucky. But I also think they have a very powerful PR machine, and you can probably find a comparable host for half the price who spends a little more money on techs and a little less money on advertising and polishing its image.