Likelihood to Recommend Good for transferring over an existing site. Truth be told, I haven't used it for building a brand new site-- I know that this is a fairly common thing but I just never needed it. For what I've used it for, it has worked well. For a small business with anyone with a little bit of technical skill, it's surprisingly good.
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 Registering a domain - I've found their site to be the easiest to navigate Website builder - their website builder is user friendly Email hosting - easy to set up and use, wether in an email app or online email. Wordpress hosting - I have multiple wordpress sites I use under one account Their customer service is always very helpful and easy to contact. 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 Support agents are woefully undertrained, even in knowledge of their own products. Support agents will always try to upsell you, even when you're dealing with an urgent, high-impact issue. There's no guarantee of uptime, and there will often be gaps in service as part of normal procedures. 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 We can't really choose anyone else and the cost/effort of moving all of the hosted data would be extremely large, and we just have to stick to them, and hope they improve service
Read full review 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 Some integration could be much cleaner and smoother. Seems it used to be easier. Plus, they took away the catch all email feature.
Read full review 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 I think a lot of companies can learn from GoDaddy's support team. I have found:
Chat or phone support is almost always available. Their agents are friendly and helpful. Their agents seem to care and be knowledgeable about a wide range of issues. I rarely have to escalate my problem to get the support that I need. If they can't help me, then they can tell me why something is happening and direct me to resources that can fix my problem. page V CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
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 We use
Wix currently for our online store. It is nice and easy to use, but they don't offer the email domains as well (the last time we checked). They have pretty decent customization of the web page, but still limited. We're going to try it with GoDaddy, since we have other services from them already. It just doesn't make sense to pay two different companies for something we can do with one.
Read full review 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 GoDaddy reduces our ROI by costing me in non-billable hours. I don't charge clients for sitting on the phone with tech support to power cycle the server or fix the php.ini file, so my $/hr takes a hit. Their nickel&dime strategy requires I have an additional conversation with clients about their max recurring fees. Small as they are, I need approval for upping their bill. GoDaddy is only the cheap option if you don't value security, stability, or performance. Read full review 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