Rackspace Managed Hosting vs. WordPress VIP

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

WordPress VIP really changed the game when it comes to WordPress CMS and Content Management. A one-stop shop for all our client's business needs. We are focusing on Content Management instead of technicalities. The big advantage is the security features covering all recent vulnerabilities that any WordPress developer/user wastes lots of precious time fixing/updating. Performance-wise, WordPress VIP is definitely up there. We’ve been doing lots of optimization work over the last few years. Every client wants to score 100. With WordPress VIP we decreased the time spent on optimization significantly and now feel confident with taking more performance optimisation work than we did before. Lastly, maybe the most important for every business is the support quality. WordPress VIP runs a superb support team with phenomenal knowledge and expertise. Quick to respond and solves issues here and now. It is definitely recommended.

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

• Keeps us informed of upcoming releases/patches associated with the Wordpress Platform.
• Introduces us to products/companies/Wordpress plugins as necessary when new business needs arise.
• Amy and Allie are excellent at managing the relationship; speaking with them on our monthly calls is a pleasure.

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

• Too many different dashboard formats
• Everything should have the same look and feel.
• The admin portal looks different than the user content portal

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

It's true enterprise ready hosting framework providing unparalleled hosting infrastructure for WordPress. Where an organisation has high load needs, but with stability and scale VIP delivers. It provides complete peace of mind that the hosting, security and scalability are taken care of and organisations can focus on developing out their website strategies

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 is documentation for everything you might need.

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 people who work for WordPress VIP clearly are passionate about representing the organisation. Therefore when support is required, they do go above and beyond what you may expect in terms of overall support. They take security very seriously, and due to the nature of VIP, it's rarely a concern for the end-user, if at all.

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

Our team manages 4 different brands' websites and before WordPress VIP we were using multiple different hosts including DreamHost and AWS. These were convoluted and didn't offer the enterprise features for our organization that WP VIP was capable of. We also considered Pantheon, but they were not Wordpress-centric enough for the direction we were going.

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

• Working as a WordPress VIP gold partner has helped our business grow from 12 staff to 28 staff in 2 years. They have brought many projects to the table that are always the right ones for us and they really understand our goals as a business.

Incentivized