A2 Hosting vs. Rackspace Fabric

Never would I recommend this company to anyone. [In my experience] they are total nightmares to deal with and depend on. You can't depend on them at all. Plus, [I feel that] they lie and manipulate the search queries based on lies (they do NOT have radio hosting yet they have ads saying that they do).

I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.

Incentivized

• the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price

• Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
• Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
• Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
• Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] customer service is awful.
• [From what I've seen] they don't care about clients.
• [In my situation their] first reaction is always to blame it on the unmanaged factor.

• It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors
• I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while

Incentivized

Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.

[In my opinion] it barely works.

they are only technically available but having someone say hello, i'm here to help, immediately is not real responsive if they actually never address the issue being reported. we don't contact support for the bland greeting, we are actually trying to solve a business process interruption

They are only good if you never update your website and i mean never. Otherwise their main performance diffrentiator is turbo web hosting, their highest shared hosting plan. When caching is working it performs well reducing load times by half, but as soon as you add a new page to the site, the updates don't show up until you clear the cache manually from multiple locations (wordpress a2optimized plugin, cpanel etc..). As they make updates to the turbo hosting A2optimized plugin, they do not test them properly and do not handle customer feedback about them, instead they are in denial and try to immediately convince the customer there is no issue at all! the old developer joke when they don't want to fix feedback: it works on my machine!

In my opinion they are unresponsive, rude, incompetent, and untrustworthy to boot.

[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.

I also used Monitis as a monitoring service for our server. Rackspace'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.

Incentivized

I believe they do not care about addressing failures when they occur. Starting out with a working service counts for nothing if you can't maintain it, fix issues when reported, and actually take the extra step to prevent them from happening again. You have to care about quality and customer service, and A2 couldn't care less

• [In my experience] they have upheaved my entire business many times by not having working servers.
• [I feel like] they have inconvenienced us many hours with tech calls over stupid things.
• [In my opinion] they have wasted so much time and man hours.

• I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need
• The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first
• I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring!

Incentivized