[LRUG] Dedicated servers in the UK?

[John Arundel]

On 2 Jul 2012, at 14:05, Sidu Ponnappa wrote:
> I'm actually curious about the last one - why not Rackspace?


I can only report my own experiences, but there seem to be organisational problems within Rackspace at the moment - a couple of projects I've worked on recently involving them have been plagued by:

* communications problems
* technical failures
* features that don't work as advertised
* multiple ticket systems and support teams that don't seem to talk to each other
* issues that have just fallen through the gaps and not been followed up. 

The API for their cloud product seems slow and unreliable, as is the web management interface which relies on it. Machines often go down or are unexpectedly migrated to other platform hosts. Bandwidth is unreliable and sometimes you have to re-provision a server two or three times to get on a host that can do useful I/O speeds. 

In order to use their load balancer product you have to configure your servers in a way I consider insecure. There is a small, fixed limit on the number of cloud servers you can have, and to get any more you have to keep creating new accounts - something that makes them unsuitable for web-scale applications. 

None of these things are deal-breakers, exactly, but I see them as symptoms that everything is not as it should be. No criticism of the people - those I've dealt with have been very competent and helpful. They just seem to be struggling within a system that isn't working.

Regards,
John
-- 
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