[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.