Elementor vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Wanted to create a website quickly and get it running within a week's time. The step-by-step guide on installing Elementor and creating the basic webpage was easy and time-efficient. Some of the advanced features can be time-consuming, but they are definitely worth it once you start creating professional sites. It fits in from basic to advanced sites; I don't think there could be any scenarios where it can be inappropriate.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Block code is very easy to work with.
• They don't have support, per se, but they have a whole big group of users on Facebook who are great at helping each other out.
• They have some templates you can use to just get going if you're in a particular industry that would probably work well with a template!
• The price is really not bad for how much you get.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Occasional plugin conflicts
• Occasional differences in appearance between the editor and live page.
• Flexbox building has a deeper learning curve than the previous sections/columns builder. In-editor guidance would be helpful here.
• Some options/widgets available in other builders aren't in Elementor, which means additional plugins are sometimes needed.

Incentivized

• 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

Elementor is critical to our ongoing success and providing our clients with world-class websites

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

1. Very intuitive user interface with very well organized options for basic and advanced design features 2. Integrates very well with wordpress and a variety of plugins 3. Vast collection of Elementor themes available in the market for the small to mid sized businesses who would still prefer desired internal control over tactical/relatively less complex website changes and thus reduce dependency /Expensive annual web design contracts

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

There support is slow and at times can be frustrating and this is why many prefer to air out their frustrations within the Facebook group community. I tend to give up as when I'm working on something and something goes wrong I need the help straight away. I do not have the patience to wait anymore.

Incentivized

In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!

Incentivized

The business team has to stick to its core competencies - Our key turning point occured when we delegated webpage design challenges to a tech. firm with specific mandates (including a certain degree of internal control). Once the initial go-live was completed, the agency trained us on internalizing ad-hoc and tactical change work

Incentivized

Elementor is a bit of a different platform than, say, easyTithe, Robly, and Apptivo, but it is comparable to Shopify. I feel like Elementor and WooCommerce are a lot easier to use than Shopify, and it doesn't come with such high fees. For our business, it was no choice! Elementor fits great for our needs!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Elementor has made it possible for our non-profit to stand out in the non-profit space in which we operate. Our website was highly flexible and looked great, which provided confidence to our donors.
• Elementor has never been a weak spot in the security of our website. We've had several attempted attacks against our website and yet everything was remained locked down.
• We have only used the free version of Elementor, so it has kept our costs low and allowed us to have a professional looking website, but being able to put more money towards our charitable cause rather than IT.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized