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The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

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

#131

Post by JALTU »

bengale wrote: post #66
stingraycharles wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

+1 Build the customer relationship.

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

#133

Post by TristanBall »

I was only every a very very small rackspace customer, but my recollection was that what Rackspace were actually fanatical about was telling you how fanatical they were. It always rubbed me the wrong way, regardless of the quality of support I received, so now, 10+ years on all I actually remember about them is that they were vaguely irritating. We ended up moving to Rimuhosting, and while I think the quality of support was probably equivalent, to my limited sample size, Rimuhosting was much less in your face while providing it, so the actual experience was far more pleasant.

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

#134

Post by rrdharan »

bravetraveler wrote: post #102
rrdharan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

Managed services, managed access

Unsolicited direct inspection of customer content is what’s surprising.

I know we don’t have homeomorphic encryption, but typically policies (requiring explicit user request / Consent) would be in place even if they can’t be sufficiently enforced with current technology.

The whole thing reminds me of that Azure LinkedIn thing (where someone was contacted on LinkedIn by a Microsoft PM based on their azure activity).

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

#135

Post by teekert »

hotpotamus wrote: post #75
teekert wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much does it cost to repair a broken leg in your country? In the US it will probably be 5 figures, so getting it paid is a pretty big concern.

No idea I never saw any medical bill, I just pay my 100€ a month. I also pay about 50% income tax and 21% on just about anything I buy.

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

#136

Post by Hippocrates »

debarshri wrote: post #130
julianlam wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a surprise? They quite literally have physical access to your VPS (even if not easily). All the things you mentioned are simple metadata available via query. If things went really sideways on one of my servers, and I could not manage to get back in (even with their 3-4 alternative methods), I fully expect DigitalOcean to be able to log in and restore access, and charge me for the privilege.

Question is how would you know the support engineer who has access to your stuff and can log you in is not a bad actor.

Seems like it's the default that employees have privileged access like this unless it is explicitly designed out of the system. It's hard to do that even in domains much simpler than a cloud.

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

#138

Post by patch_cable »

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 think sometimes (often?) in the US it is not the injured individual pursuing the lawsuit, but rather their private insurance company trying to recoup losses.

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

#139

Post by TheHappyOddish »

mgbmtl wrote: post #94
garciasn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. On…

Yikes. A backup solution that was sold, but not configured (at all! not to mentioned non-tested backups), was a very frequent occurrence whenever I inherited clients (in the 2000-2010s, before AWS took over the world, or simple VM snapshots at most other hosts). (I'm not defending anyone here, I think it's how horrible many hosting companies where was back then, or still are, whenever they have sales teams that only…

Yep. I spent similar years at an MSP, and there were multiple occasions where standard backups were not provisione, despite the client paying for them.

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

#140

Post by TheHappyOddish »

acdha wrote: post #104
rrdharan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

One thing to remember is that norms changed over time. In the 90s and 2000s it was pretty widely accepted that a sysadmin could access customer data pretty easily and that trust was basically factored into the relationship. Over time and various scandals our expectations have changed but there's definitely a generational divide here.

Have they changed? I assume Amazon, Google and Microsoft all could enter any "instance" (VPS) they choose or simply clone the disk.
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