Microsoft Azure vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.

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

• Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
• You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
• The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
• The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.

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

• The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
• The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
• Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.

• 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

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

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

As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.

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

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

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

• For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
• DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
• Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.

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