Likelihood to Recommend Armor gives you what you need to be successful regardless of technical ability. If you can maintain the systems yourself, you are definitely ahead of the game with their service. If you're not prepared to configure and maintain the systems, they do a pretty good job of getting it set up during the onboarding process so that you don't need to dig into the technical guts too much. If you find yourself in over your head, their support staff can handle it for you in most cases.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Security - we have requirements met right out of the box and the implementation of new resources is done with security in mind. Speed - We can scale resources easy and the infrastructure is fast and efficient. Responsiveness - Support tickets are handled very fast with almost immediate solutions. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Authentication and access against the secure messaging portal is overkill when the response I'm logging in to see merely says, "yes, we have your message. An agent will respond shortly". There should be an option to receive updates like this through email. The online portal that allows us to clone servers is very slow to respond. More than once I've spun up an additional server due to the lack of visual feedback on the initial request. The web application firewall does not seem to be sophisticated enough to differentiate between logged in administrators and end users. We use a CMS system which allows admins to create scripts. These often get barred by the WAF even though they are not malicious. Read full review 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 Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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!
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating Approximately 50% of all messages we receive are automated. Either that an agent will be assigned, has been assigned, or a ticket is closed. I'd like to see more 'real' interaction, and less box ticking, though I appreciate process has to be followed. That's the one point off. Everything else is very good.
Read full review In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review ScreenShots