Rackspace's 'fanatical' army drops in on rival clouds

Interview

I went for an interview in Stockley park office about eight years ago. Fortunately I didn't get the job.

There was some sour grapes at the time, primarily based around their interest in how well everyone was dressed, the fact they sent in three different people to interview me without any explanation. The people with whom I met were rude an arrogant. Conceited. By the end of the interview my distaste for how they operated was obvious, despite my best effort to remain polite. I didn't get offered the job, a relief actually as the pay was very competitive and I'd have been forced to working with pre hipster douche bags solely down to moneyh..

To cut a long post interview diagnosis short I ended up joining a truly innovative company who've allowed me to grow in every way I ever wanted. Which, not surprisingly is not out of my comfort zone.

I got a quote from them a year or two ago for a remote backup solution. The sales guy basically told me to use the same software folks from Amazon S3 recommend, but with their back end which had the same SLA but with 20% extra cost. Needless to say, we went with AWS. I really couldn't figure out their sales angle...

Fanatical?

Have been using them for their email service and can't wait to leave. Have had an issue with part of our service for nearly a year and still they cannot solve it, we've had to find a sensible workaround. Not to mention issues with not supporting IE 10 or 11 at one point, asking us to downgrade.. Closer to farcical support so wouldn't trust them with cloud.

They do talk a s good talk but haven't delivered for us.

Worst hosting company.

I used them for a few years and they were fantastic. They cost a bit more than the other companies I was using (Server Beach and Server Intellect) over in the states, but their service was fantastic.

2/3 years ago something happened and their service just turned to shit. They went from being the most helpful to foisting any problems back at you. I took my 3 servers over to the US and I would never use them again.

Fanatical Support My Arse

I pay Rackspace over $20,000 a month for various servers hosted on their private cloud. The support is absolutely horrible - they pass all issues back to you, and their so-called "experts" can't do stuff like enable MSDTC without me going in and telling them how to do it.

I'm moving everything to another provider - half the cost, twice the support (we have a corporate relationship with the (Fortune 150) company, so we get a special price).

Their support is a joke. It used to be good, once upon a time, but now it's just a matter of watching them crash and burn.

Interview disaster.

I went for an interview with them, for a consultant position. They asked me to present to them on a project - I offered two options: A standard project (not cloud related) and another on how I'd designed a cloud platform for the company I was working for at the time.

They chose the standard project! After my presentation, they said "we'd never take those risks that you have done in your project" - well, that's because Rackspace is NOT in the same market as the company I was working for is. They have this walled view, whereby anything outside of their sales model is somehow "odd" or "risky"...I told them for their information, over 90% of IT is still NOT running in a cloud (granted that it's mostly virtualised, which is not far from a cloud set-up), so it's not as an alien a concept as they thought.

That's not the worst part though. The final straw for me was when their so-called director for all the consulting teams asked me: "How would you feel about working in a team of people that are about 10 years younger than you?!"

That bordered on ageism, as far as I'm concerned...needless to say, I withdrew my application after that.

Ironically, another head-hunter approached me this year, for a senior OpenStack Architect there - no thanks!