Rackspace Managed Hosting vs. WYSIWYG Web Builder

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

If you prefer a PC/local development environment vs a fully online development tool, WYSIWYG Web Builder may be the best product available. If you are frustrated by bloated CMS systems that require constant updates and fixing of expired or conflicting plugins WYSIWYG Web Builder could be for you.

• 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

• Rapidly build website
• Builds site that load fast
• Allows for competely custom sites

• 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

• The depth of the product and available options can be a bit overwhelming when getting started

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

This is my fourth year using WYSIWYG Web Builder and as many new releases. Each new release brings a staggering number of new features and enhancements. But the updates, fixes and new features are not limited to a once a year update. The product is updated with interium releases every few months.

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

The one reason for a 9 instead of a 10 is not a ding to the product itself. When first starting out the available options and tools are a bit overwhelming. You might be able to achieve the same visual result in multiple ways. As a new user you will need to learn which options work best for you. The online tutorials are good and there are a number of very good videos available on YouTube. The support from the forum is great. New users are treated with respect and provided support and guidance. (That is certainly not the case in many support forums) After fours years and dozens of websites I am still learning new features and tools for enhancing my customer's sites.

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

Incentivized

The developer actively replies to post on the support forum. It is typical to get a reply in a few hours. The support for this product exceeds any other product I have used in the past 25 years. In addition to rapid replies from the developer the support community is very active on the forum along with several forum members providing excellent training videos.

implementaion is simple. install the product and setup your hosting ftp settings.

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

I still use Xara for graphic design and image editing. But the web development in WYSIWYG Web Builder is far superior. Compared to online editors like Weebly, Wix, etc WYSIWYG Web Builder allows you to experiment with different options saved to different files. With the online builders you can't easily have 5 options to show a client. And you don't have backup copies in case the work you did, didn't work out.

• 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

• I am able to build truly custom sites for my customers
• I am able to build sites with less time and effort, resulting in competitive pricing
• I am able to build sites with less overhead, resulting in better profits