rackspace.com
After serveral years of being a systems administrator for several ISPs, I decided that I wanted my very own box on the Internet to host my web site and help out others that needed flexible web space hosting that could help spread the cost of the rental.
Initially I went with Webfusion, and things were fine and dandy for a while before the problems of denial of service attacks against their routers, people hacking their boxes and causing more DDoS attacks, and their help line being so darn slow to get anything done. The nail in the cofin was when I neeeded to update my address and payment details - I sent serveral emails to the accounts department. The second email did receive an acknowledgement, but I still continued to receive invoices to my previous of address despite continously telling them otherwise!
My next host was Racklocation.com in the USA which offered very cheap hosting on some very well specified hardware (I think I was paying something £150 per month for an AMD Athlon 1Ghz processor, 20Gb Ultra-DMA 100 EIDE hard drive, 256Mb RAM and 25Gb of bandwidth per month). Unfortunately, Racklocation.com went belly up and was taken over by Pogolinux.com which added even further problems. Seperate, detailed opinions on Webfusion, Racklocation.com/Pogolinux.com to follow!
Anyway, I started a new job with an Internet consultancy that used Rackspace to provide their clients with web, email and DNS hosting over two servers. I was immediately impressed with their support - a 24 hour, 7 days a week, 0800 number which connects to their service centre in San Antonio, Texas, USA (where my server and my employer's servers are hosted).
In addition, they have a web-based account management tool which lets you see the amount of bandwidth used each day, ticketing system to report problems, configuration tools (including DNS management on Rackspace's DNS servers for as many domains as you need - all free!), and discussion forums between Rackspace customers and the staff. I have yet to see a better control panel for a dedicated server yet.
The connectivity of Rackspace is very good - they have multiple lines running into their facility, which means that if one route fails, another one will take over - reducing the downtime of your server to the rest of the world. SSHing into the servers is nippy, and there is rarely any network problems at their end to slow things down.
What I also find about Rackspace that other web hosting companies have shown an utter lack of is technical know-how. These guys really do know what they're doing. They've installed a very good security system on their network which sniffs out and alerts on any attempted DDoS running from any machine, or if any DDoS is attempted against their network. Portsentry is installed as standard on all dedicated Linux boxes, and all packages on a fresh system are up-to-date and security-flaw free.
Where things have gone wrong is with the tape backup options. My employers have had enormous problems with getting a tape drive to complete an entire week without a single failure. Problems have been caused by having the wrong tape drive in the machine, the wrong type of tape inserted into the drive, and requests to restore data from the tape taking over 3 days for Rackspace staff to get the tape to insert into the drive. There have been periods where it has taken many hours, if not days, to get things resolved properly, and we don't always get up-to-date progress reports unless we contact Rackspace by phone.
I myself have received some problems with the billing department who contacted me recently to say that my account is overdue for payment. I explained to them that there are plenty of funds available, and there should not be anything wrong with the card.
The problem turned out to be their accounts system. Re-entering my account details from the faxed form that I sent with my contract at the beginning of the contract term did the trick.
Overall, Rackspace offer an excellent service, but they do need to improve customer facing support a lot. I'm sure this will improve over time, and I am being very patient with them as they are the only hosting company to actually show competence at what they do. I've had no trouble at all from my server and would not hestiate to recommend Rackspace to anybody - the only exception being that you must be extremely careful about specifying your backup options as it's costly, and having dealt with many problems in this area with the support team - it may be wise to formulate your own!
Reproduced with the permission of Dooyoo UK Ltd