Likelihood to Recommend Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
CenturyLink Private Cloud is well suited for companies that are smaller and wouldn't have to undergo scaling for a longer time. Apart from that, it does well in almost all categories. It wouldn't actually be useful for bigger companies since the UI is a bit laggy sometimes and usually, it's not advisable for big companies.
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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
robust framework amazing customer support in case you're facing maintenance issues collaborative ability is off the charts 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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
UI can be really improved, since it sometimes lags a lot Very few know about the product, so they should advertise a bit more There maybe scaling issues since it's a relatively smaller company compared to its competitors 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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
It doesn't stack up that well against them, since these are big companies and have huge infrastructures and they provide smooth scaling features. However CenturyLink Private Cloud is a little concise and not many people know about it, so I feel like they should advertise more and try to improve their customer outreach.
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 Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)
We reduced our cloud hosting costs a lot after switching to CenturyLink Private Cloud Maintenance is very easy since there is documentation available for every part It had some issues with the UI but we can neglect those considering the pricing options they provide. 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