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Comment by jtagen | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised, always thought the Rackspace premium price was to prevent or significantly reduce these issues. That being said, I've had quite a few problems with them over the last year or so that is making me reconsider. The first-tier support they now outsource to India is frustrating. CloudFiles entries being "inaccessible" after saving for no known reason, happens a couple times a month. Had a managed MySQL slave replica down for 5 hours because they changed the IP of the master (mandatory maintenance) and failed to update the replica, no way to do this on my own.

AWS and Azure might not be better, but they're definitely cheaper.

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> I'm surprised, always thought the Rackspace premium price was to prevent or significantly reduce these issues.

I've found that these systems are often there to make the business-minded customer feel better vs. offering up any sort of highly-competent technical support. Rackspace fits this bill for me although I haven't been their customer for close to 10 years due to how badly they've burnt me.

On the contrary, free-tier Linode support has always been incredibly technically competent and has never let me down for the 10+ years I've been with them. If anyone from Linode is reading this - you guys are awesome, and your support staff is amazing. I can't say enough nice things about them as they've done so much to support me for a solid decade!

All I'm saying is paying for support vs. not paying doesn't mean you'll have any more technically competent help in my real-world experience. It just means "you're paying for support" on paper, and typically is just an up-sell from legacy hosting providers like Rackspace or GoDaddy. Free from Linode is 100X paid from Rackspace - all depends on the company.

I moved a company off Linode a few years ago because of ongoing intermittent packet loss (think 93%) for subsets of our customers, they never were able to do anything about it and just pointed fingers at the ISPs, who of course I have no direct contact or relationship with. Wouldn’t recommend.

Rackspace support is not just “help you when you are having trouble,” they will do sysadmin tasks for you, basically as much as you want. It’s more like light professional services + typical support. That’s why it costs more.

Yes, well aware. In-industry we call this "managed" and "un-managed" hosting.

All of my issues actually happened with "managed" hosting 10 years ago. I was in my early-20's and still getting my feet underneath me as a Linux administrator so having a backup was something I advocated when I was provisioning our hosting.

Frankly, it was probably pretty good for career development because their support staff was clueless with anything Linux administration, and if I needed an answer quick I was my only trustworthy resource. Like - basic LAMP (Linux, Apache2, MySQL, PHP) was completely beyond them even though that was the bread and butter of their business.

I haven't sprung for "managed" hosting ever since because it just taught me that I was the best person to handle my interests... and it lit a fire under my butt to get way better at my Linux chops!

> AWS and Azure might not be better, but they're definitely cheaper.

I can't speak for AWS as we don't use it but as a former client of Rackspace and a current client of Azure I can assure you that Azure is better and cheaper by a country mile.

> AWS and Azure might not be better, but they're definitely cheaper.

Azure has "ZERO % Annualized Failure Rate". It gives me such a cozy feeling.

Amen. We moved to Azure after a DDOS attack which took out our Rackspace instances and we have never looked back.

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