I started using rackspace managed hosting back in 2005. This is before the “cloud” so they were all physical hosts.
Since then I’ve used them for a mix of cloud and physical for several different companies.
I have also build data centers from the ground up and managed a lot of services on AWS( amazon web services).
After being a customer of rackspace over the last seven years I have formed the following opinion.
If you think the cloud is “scary” and mysql gives you the willies then their support might seem like wizards but in reality they are not.
I found out from an inside source that many of their support team are high school graduates who are run through a boot camp.
Instant wizards.
I have had countless dealings with support where I found zero value in the exchange.
This isn’t true of their whole team of course, at some point you might get the contact information of someone who can actually help you.
When you do hold on to it.
A great example of this is their “managed mysql”, what it amounts to is mysql installed on a supposedly faster file system and backed up.
Of course its tuned which means the innodb_buffer_size is changed per RAM size.
Thats it.
If you really have a problem with MySQL no way are the bootcamp kids going to be of much use to you.
In both cases of physical and cloud rackspace has very good uptime.
Especially in comparison to EC2, and I’m not just talking about the big EC2 outages I’m talking about the day to day.
Its pretty common in EC2 to have a server freeze up and need to be rebooted or have it reboot on its own.
Of course when you decide to move to the cloud this is something you need to plan for but in the case of rackspace I can only think of a few times when one of my cloud instances ever went offline unexpectedly.
dodizzle 