On Mar 12, 2010, at 10:48 AM, John Von Essen wrote: Rackspace.com is the worst place to do small colo or VPS. There biggest advantage is their name. Pricing is way too high, and service sucks.
Just as a counterpoint, I've been using Rackspace for years for a single dedicated server for my company and all interactions I've had with their customer service department have been excellent.
I do agree that their pricing is significantly higher than average. But their network and datacenter has been outstanding, as in I never have to think about it. Also the pricing is negotiable, and if your willing to put in the time you can add in certain features like tape backup (assuming you want them anyway) to bring down the overall cost.
To contrast rackspace against other companies, I also have had a personal, very inexpensive, dedicated server ($79/month) for years and I've been with three different companies. ValueWeb which was acquired by Hostway. They lost my business during a disastrously managed move of equipment from one data center to another in which I lost access to my server for over 8 days, 5 of which were due to the fact that they failed to communicate my new IP address to me or be available to answer my repeated requests for the new IP.
I worked with 1and1 for a while and they did have a remote console server where I could trigger a reboot or get on the console, unfortunately I had to do this multiple times per week because the hardware or network was clearly flawed in some way, and their support never understood what I was talking about, and seemed to be geared toward helping me configure my "PC" correctly.
I recently have had my personal server with http://m5hosting.com/. It's clearly a very small shop, I learned this when I called and spoke with the owner/primary doer of work named Mike. I've been with them since 2007 for a very reasonably priced dedicated server. ($105/month) I've had a few minor problems regarding the network and my server crashed twice during that time (I suspect a power issue) but they've always been very responsive and knowledgeable every time I've had to contact them. But again here is a situation where I rarely need to think about it so that means it's going well. So I'd recommend investigating them as well.
- Kevin |