Glad I'm Not RackSpace

[Jeffro]

It must suck to have to dish out 3.5 million dollars in refunds but on the flip side, it's nice to see RackSpace owning up to their own uptime policies:

According to a SEC filing by the publicly traded company RackSpace, the power outage that caused its servers to go offline for an extended period last month will cost the company up to $3.5 million USD in refunds

http://webdevnews.net/2009/07/power-...llion-refunds/

Jeffrey Scott is right though in that when the webhosting account is online and everything is working as it's supposed to, we rarely think about how good the service is but on the flipside, most of us tend to have 0 tolerance for downtime although it's inevitable. I've been with my fair share of webhosts who have been located in datacenters with constant power problems. Ughh.

[Martin]

Ouch

[andrea_r]

Yeah, but they charge so much it's only a few hundred accounts. :P

All joking aside, they are one of THE absolute best hosts I have ever experienced. I don't use them, a client did. INSANE support people. If money is no object, these guys are the ones you want to have. Seriously.

I'm not surprised they'd pony up the refunds.

[aaroncampbell]

I think they WERE the absolute best, and I had a dedicated server through them (and their dedicated servers start at about $400/mo and go up from there). That server will be decommissioned on 08/05/2009. Their service went seriously downhill when they started the Rackspace Cloud (previously called Mosso). They asked me to try it out...cloud hosting with a starting price of $100/mo, and it was great at first. Unfortunately, I think it grew too fast. They were constantly having problems, and the support which I was told would be the "same great Rackspace support" was absolute crap. I was later told by my account manager for my dedicated server through Rackspace Managed that whenever they answer a call for a Rackspace Cloud account they know they're losing money because they don't charge enough to justify phone support costs, which is why the support was so hard to deal with. I would have just moved away from the cloud offering back to Rackspace Managed, but the support there was degrading at the same time and it's never fun to be lied to (if they don't do phone support, it's definitely not the "same great Rackspace support"), so I moved to Layered Technologies who now offer Managed servers as well. The cost is actually about the same, but the server I'm on now is far superior in hardware (the other one was 3 years old) and has cPanel.

So far the service has been great, but "once bitten twice shy" so I'll reserve my judgement for a couple months and see.

[aaroncampbell]

Oh, in the spirit of full disclosure, I own Web Developer News and pay Jeffrey Scott to write articles for it. I did not, however, ask for this specific article or even choose the topic (I try not to micro-manage him, he's great at what he does).

[andrea_r]

Yeah, it's been since before they bought that out, that I was there. I can see how that would degrade support. Shame.

Not a fan of cloud hosting. Not for the stuff I do.

[joetek]

It was a bad week all around for datacenters. I wonder how it'll affect the others?

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...ek-for-uptime/

• On Monday June 29, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) experienced a power outage at its Dallas data center that left several areas of the facility without power for about 45 minutes, knocking many popular customer web sites offline.
• Early Thursday Equinix Inc. (EQIX) data centers in Sydney, Australia and Paris each experienced power failures. While the power outages were brief - Equinix said the Sydney event lasted 12 minutes while power was restored in Paris in just one minute - many key customer sites took considerably longer to recover their systems. The Sydney event led to disruptions for VoIP service in parts of Australia, while the Paris outage caused downtime for the popular video site DailyMotion and the French portal for hosting firm ClaraNet.
• Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, had lengthy performance problems on Thursday, experiencing high latency and data loss.
• A fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle late Thursday night left many of the building’s data centers without power. The fire in an basement-level electrical room triggered sprinklers and caused extensive damage to generators and electrical equipment. The damage left tenants with backup plans offline for hours, and those without backup sites down until temporary generators restored power early Saturday morning. The biggest impact was at payment gateway Authorize.net, which was offline for more than 12 hours, leaving its merchant customers unable to process credit card sales. Other sites experiencing lengthy downtime included AdHost, GeoCaching and Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
• Early Sunday, July 5, a fire at 151 Front Street, the major carrier hotel in Toronto, knocked out power on several floors of the facility used by Peer 1 networks. Power was restored in about 3 hours, after a damaged UPS unit was bypassed.

Glad none of my hosts were affected!

[Martin]

It was a bad week all around for datacenters. I wonder how it'll affect the others?

Indeed, NetBank (Commonwealth Bank) here in Australia was basically dead for 3 - 4 days for some people due to a "cyber attack".

I had to leave the house to pay the bills. First time i've seen daylight in quite a while

[joetek]

Yeah, and the whole Internet slowed to a crawl on Tuesday afternoon for some memorial.