[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.