A2 Hosting vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
A2 Hosting
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
A2 Hosting in Ann Arbor provides business website hosting, featuring free site migration, unlimited SSD, isolated dedicated servers, and related features.N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.1 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 9.5 out of 10
Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.3 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
1.0
(2 ratings)
1.1
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.0
(1 ratings)
2.2
(2 ratings)
Usability
1.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
1.0
(2 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
A2 HostingRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
A2 Hosting
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).
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Rackspace
Rackspace is very well suited as a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, particularly when you're planning on leaving the infrastructure up for a period of time. They seem to focus a bit more on that aspect of infrastructure. That is to say, they seem to promote running servers for longer periods of time and not spinning up/shutting down servers frequently based on usage spikes. While, they do support that sort of availability -- they don't have features built into their offering, necessarily, that make it a lot easier to implement. Our experiences with Rackspace have been 100% around their cloud platform, but they have another entire part of their business that is centered around hosting/maintaining/supporting physical hardware (bare metal). They have had a great reputation over the last several years (10+) for being top-notch providers in this space, which is one reason we even considered them for our Cloud-based hosting needs. We don't have any direct experience with their "bare metal" offerings, but their reputation is certainly great, and worth noting.
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Pros
A2 Hosting
  • the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price
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Rackspace
  • Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
  • Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
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Cons
A2 Hosting
  • [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.
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Rackspace
  • Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned.
  • Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers
  • In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace.
  • In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services
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Likelihood to Renew
A2 Hosting
Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.
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Rackspace
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
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Usability
A2 Hosting
[In my opinion] it barely works.
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Rackspace
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
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Reliability and Availability
A2 Hosting
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
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Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Performance
A2 Hosting
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!
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Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
A2 Hosting
In my opinion they are unresponsive, rude, incompetent, and untrustworthy to boot.
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Rackspace
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
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Implementation Rating
A2 Hosting
[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.
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Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
A2 Hosting
No answers on this topic
Rackspace
LiquidWeb or Amazon both offer some products that could be considered similar. I will say though, after years of dealing with Rackspace, their service is what always has me coming back. Their support is typically so much better than other vendors that I hesitate to use other vendors. Pricing might be cheaper, but when you have an issue and need it resolved ASAP, then Rackspace has come through in the majority of cases for me.
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Scalability
A2 Hosting
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
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Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
A2 Hosting
  • [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.
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Rackspace
  • We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
  • We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
  • A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.
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