[snowwrestler]

Amazon and Google are worthless to any company without a robust sysadmin/devops team, which is most companies in the world.

It's easy to get stuck in the tech-savvy bubble here, where most people can write code, pick up Chef in a week, and are trying to build cheaply at "web scale." Those people don't need, or want to pay for, support with their servers.

But most companies need some help to run a few servers for web and email. Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board.

That said, Rackspace needs to beef up their devops support, or they risk limiting their own abilities to grow with their customers.

[cthalupa]

> Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board.

SoftLayer has provided manged service for years, and was bigger than Rackspace even before they were purchased by IBM.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (Ignore the 2009 - the post has been updated as of 2013)

[snowwrestler]

Plenty of hosting companies offer managed hosting as an upsell. You can't even get pricing for it at Softlayer without talking to a sales rep, for example.

Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board, because even their smallest cloud servers come with phone support. As far as I know, you cannot get phone support with an arbitrary set of cloud servers at Softlayer, or Amazon, or Google.

[snacksmasters]

Would you rather be forced to fly first-class or have the option to choose?

[snowwrestler]

No one is forcing anyone to buy from Rackspace. The question is whether Rackspace has a unique value proposition against Google or Amazon, and the answer is support.

[snacksmasters]

Huh?

Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks, Google sites, Google apps, AWS Marketplace, etc..

Going by what you said about most companies, most registered businesses in the world are likely just looking for a single dinky site with a mailbox pointing @theirbusiness.com, definitely no need for more than a shared server. Google, Wordpress, Github pages, Shopify, and dozens of others make this very simple to setup and use. You said Rackspace is the only large hosting provider that provides this across the board, that is not true and they aren't even in my top 10 if I was looking for a provider.

For a single website that gets less than 10 visits / day with 5 html pages I was just quoted $75/mo minimum by Rackspace with some server management on my part.