Rackspace Managed Hosting Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We moved my company’s six email accounts to Rackspace Managed Hosting two months ago.

Likelihood to Recommend

I’m writing to make sure nobody has to endure the terrible customer service that I recently got from Rackspace Managed Hosting. I moved my company’s six email accounts there two months ago. A short time later, a malformed auto-reply email started self-replicating (which a properly-configured mail server should not allow). I quickly contacted live chat (since it took Rackspace Managed Hosting support FOUR DAYS to answer my first support ticket), but they were unable to delete the runaway email. I submitted a ticket on August 5. The bad email quickly replicated over 250,000 times and crippled my email client. After five tries their back-end support team finally fixed the problem on September 1. It took them AN ENTIRE MONTH to repair a problem that, in my opinion, should take a good admin five minutes to fix. In my opinion, stay far away from Rackspace Managed Hosting. I think their support team is massively overworked. Your business could be crippled while you wait.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Rackspace Managed Hosting to host a Microsoft Exchange email server.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Rackspace for their OpenStack hosting. This allows us to run our automation in the cloud and on-prem the same. The benefit is tremendous as we don't have to write two sets of deployment logic and automation.

Likelihood to Recommend

RackSpace is terrific for the budget-conscious enterprise-level cloud experience. If you're willing to put the effort in the payoff is tremendous especially if using a hybrid cloud model. That being said the experience and knowledge are rarely transferrable to other jobs. If you're looking for hosted OpenStack look no further.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Rackpace Cloud is being used in two ways in our company, for file hosting and for their Managed Cloud Hosting platform. We use it across the entire company, and rely heavily on the cloud-based cloud system for many important aspects of the company. The Managed Cloud Hosting Platform is vital to our presence online, and we rely on Rackspace to provide industry-leading uptime, and have been rarely disappointed.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're looking for a hosting platform that offers real support people and will make sure your site is up and running, then Rackspace Cloud is for you. It's not the cheapest option, but when you need a "real" hosting platform I would recommend Rackspace. This also goes for their Cloud-based files and option. It's such a good platform.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We host a few servers with Rackspace for various things like serving up web sites and running a Nagios monitoring platform. We chose Rackspace because we wanted to have a few cloud servers outside of our normal cloud ecosystem. This was an important factor for monitoring, because we wanted to monitor our production environment, which is hosted with a different vendor, from outside that vendor's network.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for creating cloud servers fast and easily. We found it useful when we wanted to experiment with different Linux distributions. It was easy to get them going, test them, then tear them down and rebuild them. We use Rackspace cloud servers for less critical stuff, such as less important web sites and backup monitoring servers. I would not put my production servers with Rackspace.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Rackspace is being used to host many of our servers and databases. It is not being used by our whole organization because we are working on switching over to AWS. Rackspace used to be great and reliable but has slowly been less and less reliable. Rackspace has been great at building new servers and customizing them which has been great as we are building out more machines.

Likelihood to Recommend

Rackspace has been a great service but it is almost like they are slowly giving up on their product but would still happily help support you when you move over to AWS. It seems almost as if they are pushing you off their servers and then offering their business to help you once you are running your stuff off AWS.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Rackspace for our web and database hosting, with our use handled within the IT and eCommerce departments. Our dealings with Rackspace circle around the technical aspects of hosting and serving our website and database files, and optimising the performance of both of these. It is important to note that they are responsible for the software and hardware on the server side, with no relation to the codebases themselves.

Likelihood to Recommend

This rating is based on the fact that Rackspace provides good service and responds to enquiries relatively quickly, and the product (hosting) appears to be very good. However, I am unable to compare their service one-to-one with others, as in general, I have experienced fairly good web hosting overall, so cannot say that they are definitely better than other options. To my knowledge, Rackspace was selected for their record with uptime and customer service.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Rackspace is our dedicated hosting service for our website and many other components that are vital for the day to day running of our business. Everything we do, everything we provide to earn money is made possible due to Rackspace. We required a service that ensured flawless hosting with great customer service and response times, and we got it.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to run a moderately large sized service, like a website, and need to know it is in capable hands and ready to weather anything from malicious attacks to massive loads, Rackspace is the provider for you. If you are needing to host a site to advertise a local parish bake sale, Rackspace might not be your best place to go.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Rackspace's Cloud VPS services, as well as their cloud site services.

These services were used to host a MySQL database infrastructure and a series of Wordpress sites, respectively.

Rackspace's cloud VPS infrastructure is very robust and offers some top-notch performance capabilities out of some of the other providers in the space.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use multiple products of Rackspace throughout the entire organization. We first used their cloud site solution and then we added their cloud server solution. When a new email solution had to be addressed, Rackspace's Webmail and Hosted Exchange worked great. We have since moved to Office 365, but working with Rackspace's fanatical support team made everything easy and stress free.

Likelihood to Recommend

Their fanatical support is the main reason I will recommend Rackspace. I am never on hold for a long time when I call in, I can call at any time of the day (even in the middle of the night), the team is very knowledgeable and will go out of the way to find a solution, and most importantly, they are always friendly.