[Hardik_Shah]

I have. I was working for a company that had its own data centers, but we were running out of space and time to add more. We were already using Rackspace as a managed hosting provider (we didn't want to manage our own infrastructure), so we decided to move from our data center to Rackspace's data center.

The difference in terms of services was negligible, because they all offered almost identical services. But we did it because:

* We were looking for someone to manage the hardware and infrastructure for us.

* Rackspace's managed hardware offered higher availability than what we were able to achieve on our own.

* We had a relationship with Rackspace and they understood our needs, so we felt comfortable switching over entirely.

[dx034]

Sounds really interesting. I don't understand why so many companies think the alternative to owning your DC must be the cloud. I think the step you describe is where companies can get rid of a lot of overhead and save massive amounts of money. Migrating to the cloud tends to do the opposite.

[bombcar]

Interesting - we moved the other direction (to Linode) from Rackspace because their VM/dedicated pricing was just out of whack. Our new box was nominally the same as the old at half the price, but the "4 CPU" was so much newer that it was nearly 2x.

[vidarh]

Whenever I've interacted with Rackspace they've seemed almost proud to be expensive.

[dx034]

At the same scale? I guess if you move a whole data center, they'll quote very different prices from their public ones.

[bombcar]

Yeah, I suspect Rackspace is aimed at "we'll datacenter for you" and not toward small businesses with small needs. And they price themselves accordingly to discourage those customers.