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The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

sanantonioreport.org

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

#91

Post by ollybee »

ksec wrote: post #77

Interesting how the whole Web Hosting industry changed. When RackSpace used to be well known. Now it is basically AWS / GCP / Azure or Linode / DO / Vultr or Hetzner / OVH.

It's not changed that much, it's just thata new infrastructure as a service industry has grown up.

If you went to any of the infrastructure companies you have listed and said that you had a few Wordpress sites that needed hosting but needed someone to help you get them migrate them over and make sure everything was set up properly, then they would not be able to help. With most of them you wouldn't even get through on the phone. There's still plenty of hosting companies about who will do that as part of the service with no problem.

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

#92

Post by cutemonster »

garciasn wrote: post #69
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. On…

About which year did that happen? (The data lots etc)

We were using Rackspace too, at a former workplace, for a while (no crash though).

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

#93

Post by ghaff »

gmac wrote: post #86
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…

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.

It's not clear how much these sorts of signs help. You're still liable if you were grossly negligent in some way.

One place I've been told liability waivers are useful is with activities that can potentially be dangerous. It can make it harder to make a credible a claim that you didn't know you could have a fall while hiking harder. Though, honestly in most cases no one reads these things and, again, gross negligence on the part of a guide or other leader isn't absolved anyway.

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

#94

Post by mgbmtl »

garciasn wrote: post #69
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. 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 aim to up-sell stuff and do not bother getting it properly implemented)

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

#95

Post by garciasn »

cutemonster wrote: post #92
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…

About which year did that happen? (The data lots etc) We were using Rackspace too, at a former workplace, for a while (no crash though).

I'm guessing late 2015. We went to the interim provider while they did a slow planned migration to 100% GCP which was completed after I left in late 2018.

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

#96

Post by cratermoon »

Did anyone else's spidey sense tingle when they read this in the article: "All the founders are now engaged in building other companies while often investing in other promising startups. All except Yoo were early supporters of the Rivard Report."

Note the author of the article: Robert Rivard. The Rivard Report is now the San Antonio Report. https://sanantonioreport.org/one-year-later-more-than-a-name...

To be clear: there's no questioning recent events, those are well-documented. The story of the company, its founding, and fate since Apollo bought it in 2016, though. That I'd want to hear another source.

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

#97

Post by Steltek »

michaelt wrote: post #53
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that had been given to them by the German government Really? that does sounds unlikely to me. Are you sure they didn't say "We got it from Germany" meaning it was imported from Germany rather than given to them by the German government? [edit] infact I wonder if the slide wasn't by German artist Carsten Höller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carsten_H%C3%B6ller#Slides

According to [1] the slide was built by Wiegand Sports [2] who design and make slides, from small children's slides to 'spectacular event slides' - including indoor slides for corporate offices, malls, museums etc. So this is a slide made by an established manufacturer. [1] https://www.expressnews.com/business/local/article/Resolutio... [2] https://www.wiegandslide.com/en/products/slides.html

Oh man, I can feel the summer time 3rd degree burns just by looking at those photos.

My town used to have a huge slide built into a hillside. It was "controversial" in that it was considered dangerous. After general playground renovations, the plastic substitute was subject to repeat vandalism and it's been removed entirely.

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

#98

Post by debarshri »

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.

You will be surprised how much digitalocean has access in your cloud infra. We had a support ticket, the support person could see all our pods, namespace and kubernetes objects, disk mounts etc.

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

#99

Post by kerblang »

tmountain wrote: post #39

I visited them during the peak of their success and they had a giant stainless steel slide in the middle of their facility that had been given to them by the German government. It was steep and twisty, and I inquired about the liability of having it. With a grin, a staff member told me that several employees had broken bones using the slide and that there was an active lawsuit in progress with a former employee due t…

I too visited them during the peak of their success, on one of their big job interview days. While a large group of us were waiting (for hours) we were invited to watch a series of videos of their employees "having fun" doing various contests and adventures. They were especially proud of the video of their new "Chief Brand Officer", who decided to have the company logo tattooed on their arm - like, yeah, a real & permanent tattoo.

I left.

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

#100

Post by CreepGin »

snowwrestler wrote: post #82
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 tr…

> Digital Ocean had very little to do with their decline.

From my personal experience, Digital Ocean did pull away a lot of indie devs and small businesses away from Rackspace. Those folks did not need most of the features of AWS. They just needed simple cloud servers and maybe some load balancers.

My own small business used Rackspace in 2010 to 2013 ($5k per month op cost). When DO came to our radar, it was dead simple to switch to and cut the cost almost by half.

Another thing I remember about DO was their abundance of community articles (HowTo's and server setup tips, etc...) that were well-maintained and always kept up-to-date with latest linux distros.

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