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Ranked # in Web Hosting |
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 Description:Rackspace hosts web pages in the cloud for mid-sized businesses and enterprises. The cloud hosting can be scaled up and down at a moment's notice, and you only pay for what you use. The company also guarantees that any websites they host will be up 100% of the time. Phone and email support are highly regarded, and you can go to a chat room to deal with problems. They also have dedicated servers available, though the hosting price rises exponentially. |
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Rackspace Cloud Hosting is Slow! |
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October 19, 2011
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Submitted By: Michael F. Seppi Company Size: $0 - $1 Million in revenues |
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| Rackspace has limited support and a poor hypervisor. The cloud apps that I ran were slow and I removed them off of Rackspace and ran them on the "UltraCloud" which then ran the apps 200 X faster! | |
Rackspace |
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October 16, 2011
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Submitted By: Michael O'Hear Company Size: $0 - $1 Million in revenues |
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| Setup process was painless. You register on the sites (I have both UK and US accounts) and within an hour you get a callback. The agent can confirm both accounts at the same time if you tell them so this doesn't need to be hard. One confirmed, you can create new servers straight away. The control panel is far simpler than the Amazon panel, but doesnt expose all features - if you do need something advanced configuring then a simple call or live chat to support (I've never had to wait more than 10 seconds for an answer) will get that done for you straight away. There is no training as such, although the online knowledge base is reasonably complete and the documentation is clear and easy to understand. While Rackspace doesn't offer user-generated images, for their market (professional sysadmins rather than end users) really doesnt require them for the most part. The only real disadvantage for me has been the lack of ability to preseed a server configuration. Instead I have needed to either manually script the install of all the packages I needed or use a configuration management system to do it for me. (Admittedly, this is pretty much the same problem as exists on Amazon and most other cloud providers) As to customisation, the shared-ip option makes high-availability setups rather painless compared to amazon. The disadvantage currently is the lack of additional storage if required. Currently you need to either upgrade the server package or to try to restructure your app to fit into cloudfiles. The only additional resource I have needed for my project has been a designer - I would have needed this even on a non-cloud deplyment so I don't believe it to be applicable here. The app has been integrated with monitoring systems (nagios and munin) and my deployment system (which allows me to scale up and down as load varies throughout the day and launch additional instances as needed for development/testing etc) I suppose from my perspective the only real features I use are launching, resizing and destroying instances... everything else runs on top of this infrastructure. From my perspective, using Amzon specific features means that I am only able to run on the amazon cloud. I want to reduce this limitation as much as possible. For this reason I replace many of the Amazon-centric services with open source equivilents... I use gearman/redis for taskqueues (SQS) and pub/sub, pdns/clouddns instead of route 53, mongodb (replicasets) instead of simpledb etc... It might be slightly more expensive for some things, but it does mean that issues such as Amazon SQS (if I was on Amzon) with its occassional slow-downs (1+ minute latency times) wont affect me and my apps can be moved to any other cloud/provider that offers simple servers or VPSs... |
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There when you need it. |
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May 5, 2011
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Submitted By: Bruce Felkins Company Size: $1 Million - $5 Million in revenues |
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| My company has been using Rackspace hosted email and virtual servers for six months now and we've had a very good experience throughout the process. There have been few problems and when I need information the customer care center is responsive. | |
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April 22, 2011
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Submitted By: Will Donahue Company Size: $10 Million - $50 Million in revenues |
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| We mainly use Rackspace to host our Hadoop cluster in the CloudServer environment. We have built an automation around their API in order to launch and scale our cluster on demand. Being a small start-up flexibility and cost efficiency are key. We have had a good overall experience with their support. You can always live chat with a support rep any time and not have to wait more than a few minutes. Their overall setup is clean, efficient, and performant. We have made several suggestions in order to make it more useful and catch it up to their competitors like Amazon. There are quite a few features they do lack like EBS volumes, EMR, granular user level security, and virtual servers with different specs (more space, less memory for example). | |
