[leokun]

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops.

We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you can't capture an image of a vm without shutting it down. Also you can't just give your VM a regular ssh public key, you have to generate SSL like certs. Also weird is a lot of the documentation is only for the Windows side of things, even though you can get some of that stuff to work on linux and that you can do that by installing an SDK even though you might not be installing an application, just running your own stuff on a VM.

[nemesisj]

I'd stay away from Rackspace London as well. Horrible horrible experience.

1. Noisy neighbours impact you all the time

2. The staff are really poorly trained and don't know how to troubleshoot.

3. They're expensive.

4. Their control panels are really bad, constantly being updated and migrated, and are just a complete mess.

5. They've had several major network outages that have lasted for quite a long time (hours) that they blame on "upstream routing issues" despite supposedly having multiple redundant upstream carriers.

6. They'll randomly reboot your box without notice. If you open a ticket there's an almost certain chance they'll just reboot your box no matter how much you ask them not to.

7. The IO on the boxes is really bad.

8. They don't proactively monitor any of their servers, and their "new fancy" monitoring product only goes down to 5 minute resolution, so it's worse than Pingdom, for example.

[russell_h]

Cloud Monitoring (disclaimer: I work on it) can actually be configured to poll as often as every 30 seconds from each location, or just every 30 seconds in the case of agent checks. I believe we default to 1 minute intervals, but if you want to change it you can browse to your check in our Control Panel and click the little edit icon where it says "Period: 60 seconds".

[nemesisj]

This is either brand new (within the last few weeks) or your coworkers don't know anything about it. The whole monitoring thing has been a farce for a year or more, as it's been coming real soon now, then in beta, then severely limited, then costs money, etc.

[startupcry]

we have had rather similar experience with RS support. Essentially when you call in what's happening is you get to talk to some people who literally have no clue and are just "call" masters...they HOPEFULLY after some time pass you on to L1 technicians who have A clue...and it goes on and on and on like this until someone more senior takes over and resolves the issue. Worth the extra money ? Nah. The only advantage I'm seeing is non-ephemeral instances, though you should be prepared for failure in Cloud and don't expect miracles.

[velodrome]

Was this on the 1st-gen and/or 2nd-gen Rackspace cloud servers?

[nemesisj]

On all gens. They're all terrible.

[troels]

For balance, my previous venture hosted (still does) on RS London and we had good experience with them. The few times where we needed support, they were excellent.

[Kequc]

I too have had issues with connectivity with Rackspace. Also anecdotally I've heard that the main recommended solution by the article in the OP, hetzner, is one that crashed non stop for someone in the past.

You just can't beat AWS right now for reliability, feature set and speed. We started using them recently and they are a tiny bit more expensive. But it's the difference between fresh air and breathing carbon monoxide.

At least so far.

[alanning]

Just to add another data point, we've been using a 4GB cloud server in the Dallas datacenter for 9 months now and it has been solid. (Solid meaning works as expected, no outages/problems.)

Maybe we lucked out with who else is sharing the hardware.

[thejosh]

How many server(s) did you have with RS?

We only have 2 mid-sized virtual servers in DFW and things have been working flawlessly for us..

[thomasmeeks]

Really the issue is that virtual hosts can affect each other quite a bit on Rackspace compared to, say, AWS. If your server behaves poorly, Rackspace can and will shut it off. One of our non-critical servers ran out of memory, thrashed swap, and was shut down in pretty short order by Rackspace. Which is good, sort of, I don't want to hurt other customers. Still, getting it turned back on was not a very fast process.

So it is kind of a roll of the dice. Are the other customers on your hardware well behaved? Will they stay that way?

It is a trade-off, you get way better performance if the other virtual hosts on the box are quiet. But if you plan your capacity around those quiet periods you can be in for quite a shock once the hardware gets busy. I've run critical servers on hosts like this and it can be a headache.

[leokun]

It's because you only have 2 servers, which reduces the likelihood that you're sharing a host machine with a misbehaving vm. You're probably also not using a load balancer or taxing the network much yourself.

[thejosh]

Yep!

That's why I was asking about the performance with more VMs, I don't use many virtual servers at RS for my day job.