My experiences interacting with the Rackspace Cloud have been terrible terrible terrible. I could probably write a short book on how bad some of it was.

I literally had so many issues with them when last year (when our startup became extremely popular) I vowed to teach myself server administration so I could begin to run things myself on EC2 and never have to deal with the likes of their terrible customer support again.

Give Softlayer a shot, they've been outstanding for me.

20 new servers at Softlayer: $4k/month to month, provisioned in 2 hours

20 almost equivalent servers at Rackspace: $10k/month on a 1-2 year contract, provisioned a week after two weeks of quotes and contract negotiations.

That's what I was expecting you to give as the reason to the title of your post.