Rack Space

SO, you open an account with Rackspace to support your business. You are thinking of changing provider, and send an email asking how to close your account.

A week later, your account is closed - without any confirmation from you, because you did not respond to their messages. To close an account without CONFIRMATION - poor business practice - cased me the loss of a Monday trying sort it out.

Even with the "how was your weekend" and "what a beautiful day" stuff from Customer Service - cancelling account without final approval of the customer is a terrible service.

Hi,

Used Rackspace for MANY years now, support used to be good, but over the last few months it has been getting worse, in the last two weeks I have had to pay an external company to fix issues they should be sorting out, when asked about what they support I was told they don't actually have a list, seems to be up to whoever answers the phone.

Fanatical support is a joke, but I'm not smiling at the moment, they charge top rates for a VERY mediocre service.

Overcharged by 3x, then would only give me credit.

Then the samething happened the 2nd month

The RackSpace Cloud was attacking our server for weeks on end with probes and SQL injections, causing load issues and server errors. RackSpace say they offer "fanatical support", but nothing could be further from the truth. The main abuse@ address bounced first of all. Then, when sending emails nothing was confirmed and there were no read receipts or ticket numbers. There was no way of knowing if the abuse complaints were even being received. Then I called the customer service line and they did not seem to know what an "abuse department" was, so I had to explain what this was to them and eventually I was routed to another country for AUP support. Then RackSpace told me they did not own the IP addresses making the attacks, but then conceded they did, since a WHOIS lookup quickly shows RackSpace to be the netblock owners! With no further explanation they said the matter was resolved and gave no additional information.

A truly unprofessional response in my opinion. You'd think a company's AUP department could not get such basic things wrong. They would not give a telephone number to contact them on; they would not identify themselves, even though they had full LinkedIn profiles which could be called up in seconds. The total attitude was "why are you calling and bothering us?".

Searching Google, the RackSpace cloud is well documented as being the source of numerous attacks by spammers and trojans. I would not recommend them on that basis. If you are an innocent third party you are treated with contempt. They even allowed the customers in question to carry on using their services after breaching their own AUP!

No apology was even given - dreadful company, awful CRM. I'm not a RackSpace customer, and never will be based upon this experience.

Support - generally excellent apart from one episode where outgoing email got hacked in the middle of the night which meant no one could send out email for 24 hours. Very sloppy response from the team on that one, but prior to that, support was really first rate.

Reliability is incredible - I've never seen a webhsoting company like it. No idea how they keep their servers online, but they do.

So how was I stuffed by Rackspace?

Having hosted all of my websites with them for 4 years, I was notifed by my accoutn manager that the operating system was coming to end of support life and I needed to migrate to a new server.

No problem I said. Great - that will be £500 per year extra. Okay - not happy with that I said, but as reliability has been so good I'll grin and bare it.

What is the plan for migration I ask? Oh - you have to do that yourself.

So there I was, paying over 5 thousand pounds per year for a fully managed solution, but at the end of server life - you are on your own.

I was livid - I had 220 websites - half of which were database driven and each one was going to have to be migrated manually onto a new server with new IP address.

They 'generously' said that I could have the new server for two weeks for free whilst I migrated sites across.

What a joke. I was absolutely furious - anyone who has migrated even one databse driven site will know that it is a time consuming process to say the least. To move 100 database driven sites and configure somewhere around 2000 email accounts was painful beyond belief.

So, having been forced into migrating to a new server, needless to say I decided to drop Rackspace and signed up for a reseller account with Heart Internet and am now saving myself 5 thousand pounts per year. Reliability not as good, but what the hell, I'm saving thousands.

And if anyone from Rackspace are reading this - it took me nearly three months to move all my sites - not two weeks, because these things need planning.

So - thinking of using Rackspace? If you have money to burn and you need reliability then yes - they are good. But then they should be at those prices. But please check the end of life terms for your server/operating system.

We're not the biggest of companies, but you like to feel you're still worth something to any 3rd Part you deal with. We have 3 servers with Rackspace and I've always found it easier to sleep with these guys supporting all the sorts of issues we've gone through across the 20+ sites my small team have to manage.

Their "unsupported" support beats the last lot we were with and knew on that basis alone I'd be sticking around. I've always had a great response time, particularly from a phone call (usually sorted there and then) but the ticket system's great as well and always a bonus to have all the info you need backed up somewhere to refer to in future if the need arises.

We didn't go with Rackspace at first because of the price, but strangely when we did swap to them they gave us better servers than what we were on for the same hosting cost.

Really this has all been an experience for us in knowing just how important support is, and if that's important to you over getting an extra 10g HDD space with someone else, then hands down go with Rackspace!

Whilst on the face of it they're expensive, if you truly compare like-with-like then they are actually quite competitive (and I've done this regularly). I've used Rackspace now for several years and their support is (nearly) always truly superb and on the odd occation they haven't come up to par - they've always been upfront about making things right. And you can't say fairer than that!

Support is limited for area outside their area of concern, but they've always at least tried to help if they can.

Excellent service throughout the signup process and whilst setting up. The online chat people are very helpful and quick to answer any queries or problems you might have. Can't comment on uptime yet as not been a customer long enough but looking very favourable so far! Recommended.

Hi,

This review is for the email service only.

We use them for hosting in the UK, two servers one firewall and Exchang.

Hosting OK, FORGET Exchange! absolutly appalling service, rubbish support, deny something is wrong, then funny to see an hour later system monitor showed an error!.

Recommend UK hosting, forget the email service, we have used cheaper and far better providers, Rackspace should invest in this rather than slick advertising, you can only paper over so many cracks before the wall falls down.

A customer for MANY years

Hi,

I work for a relatively small company and use RackSpace for all our hosting requirements and have nothing but high praise for them. As a result we have been working with them for the past 5 years.

You'll be assigned with a full-time Business Account Manager who will assist with all aspects of your hosted environment, if he/she is unable to answer your particular question they will involve the relevant resource to assist ASAP.

The support response is fantastic - 24hr support 7 days a week. If you require phone support you simply dial the specific number, give your account details and the receptionist will put you through to the relevant support engineer. The engineers that I've spoken with have been very knowledgeable and more than willing to assist with issues that are probably outside of their remit.

The use of their ticketing system also allows you to track, raise and respond to all issues through the online portal.

If asked I would recommend Rackspace to anyone looking for a hosted solution!!