Rackspace refuses to enlist in cloud's latest price cutting war

Well, Good Luck to 'em

Rackspace seems to have forgotten that once upon a time it was engaged in a fierce price war per unit with its competitors. 1.5c/h at the lowest tier, and it shone with a powerful light, and sold itself as the underdog that it was, and with all the trimmings to boot. I have no doubt that many customers, including yours truly, were enticed by the unbeatable prices for such an important contender in cloud. Especially because, for entry-level applications, it was very economical, indeed.

Good luck to them. I'm looking for good prices, but also good service. Rackspace has met both requirements for me thus far, unlike the others. "Premium pricing" is only going to borrow you so much loyalty though, and if a ubiquitous cloud starts offering reasonably-priced per-incident support, IPv6 and public-facing IPv4, the game is probably up.

So on one server quote the cost difference is $3,504/year. On 10 servers that's $35,040/year. At that point you may wish to use Azure/AWS/Google and pay for readily available competitive implementation/support contractors/staff.

If they are turning it into a commodity, then don't be surprised when lots of companies spring up in the near future with AWS or Azure qualifications.

3rd party vendor products are also going to be built with the big boys in mind. Integration costs may be higher with Rackspace.

Seems like they are moving into a very niche market now.

I have to concur with Rackspace, even when that means I don't get super cheap virtual servers. Price wars are good for us, but if nobody stops at some point it becomes a bloodbath where only those with deep pockets will be able to survive.

As far as my experience goes, Rackspace does have pretty good uptime and support, and its pricing is still within the decent range. They're now offering IPv6 and extra "storage blocks" which seem to be just extra virtual HDDs. My only complaint in the earlier days was that you had to up everything, not just the HDD space if you needed more. This seems to no longer be the case and that's good.

Haven't been able to do AWS as they don't do CVV2 validation and all my cards bounce because of that; and Google is one company I just don't trust for private data. So I think I'm staying on Rackspace Cloud even if it is now a bit more expensive...

One of my clients uses Rackspace and I am in the middle of signing up another. Can you call Google, Amazon or Microsoft? Well... yes but after being passed around several cities globally with people for which English is not their first language, you may finally get some help. Once they have taken over your computer as they can't just tell you what to do. Sometimes the wait for answering a call is an hour or more.

Rackspace have direct numbers all over the world. You phone support and within 1 or 2 rings it's picked up and answered by very polite and competent support staff. They are courteous, open and fix problems very quickly. Frankly its worth the extra expenditure and I'm sick of the lowest common denominator where as long as it's really cheap people put up with pathetic service. I applaud Rackspace for sticking to their principlies and offering an alternative. It's my favourite cloud provider currently.

My experience with Rackspace has been good

I only use a single Cloud Server, started at the bottom with 256 MB, doubled recently to 512. Plenty of oomph for Tomcat/MySQL web app development and testing. I manage (mismanage?) the server with an occasional (so far $0) Trouble Ticket request; answers have been accurate and helpful. They are following a sensible mix & match strategy with CPU/RAM/HDD (or SSD) combos with Cloud Blocks (mounted files), Cloud Files (streaming files via URL), message queues, load balancers, MySQL servers, etc. Having been spoiled by years of AS/400 system management simplicity, as an programmer I appreciate their attention to detail in enabling extra functionality without me having to be a full blooded network admin. For a production app I would use their managed services. Sensible company.