Rackspace support has plummeted horribly from a few years ago. They still charge a huge premium, and act like prima donnas, but they are just not worth it.
I didn't mention softlayer because I did not want to look like a stooge but yeah, that is who I use these days. Decent prices, reasonable support, you would have to give me a reason not to go with them for a new deploy.
I also love softlayer; they have a variety of datacenters now (including san jose), great pricing (except for RAM, but you can negotiate that), and their service, while a lot smaller team than rackspace, is still very good.
Their cloud product isn't as good as Rackspace and nowhere near as good as EC2, but maybe that will improve. I still like rackspace too; I wouldn't switch from one to the other, but I would definitely evaluate both whenever making a decision about hosting for a new project.
"As part of our efforts to continually improve our Rackspace Cloud offerings, we will be performing maintenance on our Cloud Servers environment. The maintenance window has been rescheduled and will now occur on Friday November 12th, 2010 from 10:00 pm US-CDT (3:00 am GMT) and end Saturday November 13th, 2010 at 10:00am US-CDT (3:00 pm GMT). This maintenance is required to update our billing systems. These changes will not affect nor change any of your current billing fees."
Ok, scheduled down-time is better than unscheduled down-time, but it's still down-time.
Hm. Well, I don't like them. It's subjective, you might disagree. But off the top of my head:
1. Contracts. They want 1 years minimum contracts for any dedicated servers. For truly gargantuan orders I could understand this but for one puny server? Never.
2. Their definition of "cloud" is different from mine. To use their "cloud" services your servers need to be public facing, ie on public IPs. Want them on your own VPN? You can stil get the cloud prices but not the API. you create and cancel servers via tickets. This is different from VPS how?
3. Sloooow provisioning - even if you are able to use their "public cloud" API to provision a server - prepare to wait hours for it to be done, leading me to suspect it does nothing more than email a tech to provision a VPS and hook it up somehow. Oh, you can't pause them to save money either, again making me think these "cloud" servers are nothing more than slicehosts with an extra layer of abstraction
re 3) I'm not sure specifically what happened in your case, but generally servers are provisioned and online in the public cloud within a few minutes -- If I had to guess, its possible the huddle you were in had some kind of capacity issue or other fault that prevented immediate provisioning. If you ever boot a server and its not online in <5 minutes, I'd go straight to support chat, and they generally can tell you what is going on.
It sounds like you're not a fan of Rackspace (and that's fine) but you can't honestly believe that an API sends an email to a tech. That's just completely false statement that no one in there right mind should believe.
