The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’ • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by brightball » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

rrdharan wrote: post #78

brightball wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with a company back in 2007-08 who was using Rackspace. I'll never forget the day I was sitting at a command prompt looking at htop trying to figure out what was straining the server so much...when I got a message in the terminal from Rackspace telling me exactly what was happening and what we needed to change to fix it. Support person just chatting with me right there in the terminal, without me even having to…

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

At the time, I thought it was pretty cool.

IIRC part of the pitch and the cost was that they were literally supplementing your IT department with the same types of agreements you'd have for an outsourced IT provider.

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

#82

Post by snowwrestler » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

skilled wrote: post #20

Rackspace had such a strong reputation during the 2000s, particularly for dedicated servers. I wonder if anyone in their exec team ever brought up the fact that they got their ass kicked by DigitalOcean, and similar platforms when it comes to affordable and simple hosting.

Rackspace was never the most affordable; their differentiator was service. Digital Ocean had very little to do with their decline.

The biggest factor was the shift in corporate mindset from “we need to operate our own servers” to “we need to orchestrate services running on someone else’s servers.” Probably AWS is most to blame for that.

Rackspace tried to make the jump across that chasm several times but they were trapped on the wrong side of the Innovators Dilemma. All their existing customers expected (expensive) full phone support. And new customers who wanted automated cloud systems with minimal support did not look to Rackspace for that.

Eventually they leaned entirely toward service and started reselling and supporting all the major cloud platforms. I would bet that is the majority of their revenue today. Any hosting they do should be considered a legacy business.

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

#83

Post by 51Cards » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

We still host some dedicated servers at Rackspace and while the technical side has continued to be solid their phone support is awful now. I used to call in and have a specialist on the phone very quickly, now I get handed off to an obviously off-shore support person who I think is running a script before being escalated to a proper specialist... when available. We've been with them for almost 20 years but I think in the next couple that's going to change.

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

#84

Post by ilikecakeandpie » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

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…

>In the US there is always a lawsuit and it's someone's fault

You can pretty much sue anyone for anything for sure, but there are big differences between criminal and civil law. A lot of cases come down to the "reasonable person standard" and what level of security should be inherently provided. Choosing to slide down a big crazy slide while standing up and hurting yourself probably fails the reasonable person standard, but choosing to slide down a big crazy slide while sitting and becoming injured because a piece of the slide breaks probably passes the reasonable person standard

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

#85

Post by devsploit » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

Rackspace was the best company I ever worked for as a software engineer. Started off as a contractor -- even then they treated me with respect and I felt no different than an employee. But when I became an employee -- WOW! The best onboarding I've ever had. It was also the best team I ever worked with. Only team I ever worked with that actually felt like a team and not a bunch of frenemies trying to step on eachother's necks to climb up the ladder. I still think Rackspace is a Good company with Good people. It's a shame to see the mismanagement of the work of such a great group of people.

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

#86

Post by gmac » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

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…

In the UK, you might not get the 'at own risk' sign, not because people aren't going to sue you, but because posting an 'at own risk' sign doesn't do a lot to change your liability. Whatever signs you post, it's still your responsibility to do everything you reasonably can to make sure it doesn't injure or kill people.

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

#87

Post by bluedino » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

They were definitely not cheap, but looking back, $249 for a low-end server plus the expertise you got was well worth it. They had some people that really knew their stuff back then.

But by 2010, 2011, it started to fade. They physically lost one of our servers and it took 2 hours to power cycle our stack (the firewall they provided is actually what died).

We wanted to double our RAM from 16GB to 32GB. It would have doubled our monthly cost.

Then they purchased Slicehost and that integration went terribly.

Their hosted Exchange support was bad from the start. Useless agents using chat, nobody knew how to read logs, it was always down...

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

#88

Post by sredevops » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #87

They were definitely not cheap, but looking back, $249 for a low-end server plus the expertise you got was well worth it. They had some people that really knew their stuff back then. But by 2010, 2011, it started to fade. They physically lost one of our servers and it took 2 hours to power cycle our stack (the firewall they provided is actually what died). We wanted to double our RAM from 16GB to 32GB. It would have…

Right before they went public, they started to outsource a lot of their support. It looked like lipstick on a pig.

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

#89

Post by quantumfissure » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

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…

It's usually way over exaggerated in the US. The "I'm suing for $50000000 because I was the stupid one" is rare, which is why it hits the news.

While it's true we have lots of lawyers, you need them for everything from making wills to starting a business. They're not all criminal/civil and I'd be willing to bet that a lot have never seen the inside of a courtroom, they're just there to make sure all the T's are crossed and i's dotted properly in legal contracts. My company is rather small, but has four lawyers just to interpret EU to NA trademark/copyright/contracts/etc...

When it comes to "who's actually more litigious", the US doesn't actually come close to Germany; Sweden; Israel; or Austria.

"Here is a list of the top 5 most litigious countries by capita: 1. Germany: 123.2/1,000 2. Sweden: 111.2/1,000 3. Israel: 96.8/1,000 4. Austria: 95.9/1,000 5. U.S.: 74.5/1,000. The Top 10 also includes the UK (64.4); Denmark (62.5); Hungary (52.4); Portugal (40.7); and France (40.3)."

https://eaccny.com/news/member-news/dont-let-these-10-legal-...

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

#90

Post by chunk_waffle » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

Used Rackspace heavily around 2012ish to 2015ish but eventually migrated most of out stuff to AWS. As of 2020ish or so we had a handful of VMs we'd not migrated yet and were migrating them one at a time.

Whenever we completed the migration, and wanted to delete the VM we were forced to make a phone call to a real person, who would try to talk us out of deleting the VM! We were prevented from doing it from the console, and chat support would not do it either, we were forced to call in. Complete bullshit and would never consider Rackspace for anything ever again after that experience.