Rackspace Virtual Server Platform Review
June 20, 2017

Rackspace Virtual Server Platform Review

Jim Rubenstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Rackspace

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.

  • Excellent, responsive, reliable, and HELPFUL support
  • Robust server offerings
  • Excellent uptime
  • Fair pricing
  • Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
  • The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
  • The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
  • There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.
  • The reliability of Rackspace allowed us to respond to a major network outage with another provider in just a few hours, experiencing minimal downtime.
  • The availability of robust cloud machines made their offering better than 90% of the other IaaS providers available.
  • The real-time support available to troubleshoot and diagnose any issues helped our engineering and ops teams stay on task and offload some nuanced issues onto their support team, freeing up our resources to serve our clients.
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support.

We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers.

We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider.

Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available).

We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system.

Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.
MariaDB, MySQL, GitHub, Laravel PHP Framework, Apache Web Server, Trello, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), CloudFlare, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle ZFS
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.

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