A Year With Rackspace

[box type=”info” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=”100%”]First let’s get something out of the way here. I have been a client of Rackspace for roughly 2 years now, and have become a partner with them in November of 2013. With that being said this post is written without any bias, and discusses solely my experiences as a client with Rackspace.[/box]

Rackspace was founded in 1998 and since then they have skyrocketed in growth – currently offering an impressive portfolio of dedicated and cloud hosting solutions. By 2008 Rackspace became a publicly traded company (RAX:NYSE) and currently guarantees a 100% network uptime along with an impressive lineup of awards and certifications.

Now all of this sounds pretty impressive – however what does it feel like to be hosted by Rackspace? Surely a company that works with the majority of the Fortune Top 100 companies looses track with their smaller clients right? Wrong.

See over the past 2 years as a client I have come to know the names of the majority of the people I have dealt with. I still have the same account manager who coordinates my sales needs and plans the deployment of new servers and handles their configurations; and over the past year I have dealt with many of the same support technicians as-well. Honestly we’ve never had a boring conversation and that says something. Dealing with Rackspace support is something you actually enjoy. Its a pleasant experience. It doesn’t involve a ridiculously long wait on the phone; and the conversation doesn’t involve being pitched to upgrade or buy additional services. You’re talking to someone knowledgeable, and someone who can translate tech talk into common terms.

Now as far as the actual service is. Having experience with both Rackspaces cloud and dedicated solutions I can say I’ve never had any issues with either. Over the past year I have never experienced any network issues; and the two DDOS attacks I experienced were quickly picked up and we worked together to mitigate them. Having had both solutions managed has also minimized my need to get my own hands dirty however this did give me a phenomenal insight to the knowledge of the support teams over at Rackspace.

See you could just leave things entirely in their hands. Make use of Rackspace monitoring events to create uptime checks of your site. These alerts will automatically generate a new support ticket should one of the checks fail – at which point Rackspace will come in and investigate. However you’re more than welcome to be proactive with things. Dig into the log files with your support team, ask questions and work with them to come up with a solution.

Its been this support that has raised Rackspace through the ranks; and Rackspace employs the same level of support for an existing client as they do for a potential client. Welcome to the world of Rackspace’s Pre-Sales Support. Since Rackspace offers quiet an extensive line-up of products and services it can be very easy to configure for yourself an amazing server that costs double what you actually need to spend. This is where Rackspace Partners (such as myself) and the Rackspace Pre-Sales Support team come into play. Your exact needs and plans for your website are taken into consideration to come up with the perfect solution for your budget. Often times this conversation will include a sales manager and a sys admin on the line to coordinate the best configuration.