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The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

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Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#61

Post by hotpotamus »

Hippocrates wrote: post #50

My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was. We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator bu…

I probably know some of the guys who helped you out and there's a couple great ones still there. The legal team came up with the phrase "reasonable endeavor" (they didn't like best effort), and they wrote a disclaimer form they'd have customers fill out that what they were about to was beyond official support. As long as you signed that, support was usually pretty happy to "give it the old college try" as one told me. And I'll let you in on another little secret - a lot of those sysadmins were learning along with you. One of my very early projects was building out a precision time protocol service for a customer who asked for it - which ended up being a good learning experience for me.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#62

Post by jrootabega »

brk wrote: post #31

I had been a Rackspace customer a few times at various roles. I never experienced this "fanatical support" on anything that mattered. After several outages where we received pathetic root-cause reports initially, and had to push them hard to provide actual data, and clear commitments to shore up their systems, I would describe them as "fanatical liars". It is funny, just the other day my wife and I were discussing cl…

In my experience, the story with companies like this, with images like this, is that's it's almost always lying marketing/incorrect customer belief long, long, long before it's widely recognized. It's not a question of them degrading; it's a question of enough people realizing it, or them screwing up enough to get wider coverage. I was not happy with Rackspace's service something like 9-10 years ago, and the story I see here today is not "Rackspace bad," but "Enough people finally realize Rackspace bad." I've had similar experiences with the usual suspects: ProtonMail, Namecheap, Gandi, a few more I can't remember right now. Whatever the popular perception of quality they enjoy, you can be assured their actual quality is far, far less.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#63

Post by justsomehnguy »

alt227 wrote: post #12
Mistletoe wrote: post #8

This is the first I heard of any of this. Were there no stories on HN about the whole ransom debacle? Bizarre.

I think this just goes to show how few people use Rackspace hosted exchange. Most people migrated to O365 years ago. Rackspaces exchange servers were still running Exchange 2013 until the end, and their engineers were deperately trying to push people to migrate to Microsoft long before this happened. I think this is a blessing in disguise for them really. There were around 20 submissions to HN over the last 2 weeks,…

> were still running Exchange 2013 until the end

I don't remember well but MS killed some things in the later versions on which some hosted management solutions relied.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#65

Post by mitchdoogle »

pigtailgirl wrote: post #16

-- is it true the digital ocean support also bad now?? - who has good support? --

I've always found Digital Ocean to have such excellent documentation and usability that I've never had to contact support. Except a couple times to increase my number of reserved IPs which they did in less than 30 minutes or so

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#66

Post by bengale »

stingraycharles wrote: post #51
Hippocrates wrote: post #50

My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was. We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator bu…

I’ve had a similar pleasure in the early 2000s. It may seem absurd, but from a business perspective it makes sense: so many support questions fall into a gray area of “this is really not our business because the customer doesn’t know X, but without solving it they’ll be unhappy”. It makes sense to just say “fuck it, we’ll help them with anything, as long as they’re paying”. It’s a similar approach as we take at my cu…

We do something similar on the non-tech side. We offer a saas product but most of our questions are more around how the person should be doing their job rather than how to use our software so we have a small team of experts that can answer those questions, they can also help with content creating on the marketing side too which is handy. We constantly hear from our customers that this level of service is one of the key things they really value from us.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#67

Post by xofer »

teekert wrote: post #55
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a "use this slide at your own risk" sign be enough to prevent any lawsuits?

This is so a US thing. In my country an adult is just expected to be able to look at a slide, judge it as dangerous, have te freedom to do it anyway, receive medial help if needed, feel the shame, experienced a learning moment. Get laughed at, Laugh about it. In the US there is always a lawsuit and it's someone's fault. It always feels like a not-so-nice place to be. Then again it makes for great lawyer and medical s…

I'm in the US and for years wrote software for the medical industry. I was contracted by a European company to write an app, and of course filled it with disclaimers and extra clicks asking "Are you sure?" When I demoed it, they asked what all that crap was for. I said something like, "Umm, liability, duh." Their response: "Oh, we don't sue people for honest mistakes here."

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#68

Post by bengale »

Hippocrates wrote: post #50

My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was. We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator bu…

I'm pretty often surprised by how good AWS premium support is. Every time I've asked them a question they seem to have gone to quite the lengths to gather information even when the issue isn't really theirs.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#69

Post by garciasn »

Hippocrates wrote: post #50

My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was. We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator bu…

We had Rackspace and used them for our managed servers at a prior job. We had a machine with 18-24 cores and something like 768GB of RAM that handled all of our VMs, including our SAS server. It had a bunch of native SSDs and it was connected to a 20TB JBOD of SSDs and a 100TB JBOD of slower spinning disks. They recommended this setup to my predecessor as it was WAY less money than a similar SAN configuration.

So. One day the two JBOD enclosures just start failing. We lose EVERYTHING. Ok, that sucks, but Rackspace handles all of our backups for us through our SLA. Let's get that restored while they figure out the JBOD issue.

Two things come out of this:

1. Their 'fanatical support' were 'backing us up' but they never actually tested the solution and...we lost everything. There were no backups.

2. They sold us the JBODs less than 18 months prior but they no longer supported them and thus we'd have to invest in a SAN--which was a crazy investment more.

---

We had already been planning a transfer to a new local data center over the course of a year's time. We called up the new company and told them we needed to move over to their shit in 7 days. They had us up in 2.

I'll never consider Rackspace for anything.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#70

Post by ghaff »

teekert wrote: post #55
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a "use this slide at your own risk" sign be enough to prevent any lawsuits?

This is so a US thing. In my country an adult is just expected to be able to look at a slide, judge it as dangerous, have te freedom to do it anyway, receive medial help if needed, feel the shame, experienced a learning moment. Get laughed at, Laugh about it. In the US there is always a lawsuit and it's someone's fault. It always feels like a not-so-nice place to be. Then again it makes for great lawyer and medical s…

>This is so a US thing.

It's also rather exaggerated. People get injured all the time doing all sorts of activities without lawyers getting involved. And actual findings of negligence have a fairly high bar although companies do sometimes make payments to make suits go away especially if they did something not by the book.

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