For me, it is a horrible experience.

They need to call your over the phone in order to verify you are a human being and they need to know what you are going to do with their "cloud" - they called it "Onboarding"

I told them I just want to experiment with their apis and maybe they think I have no business value or I am a potential spammer, so they rejected my "Onboarding" request without any reason given. (So you know I am not commenting from the technical point of view since I have never access to their system)

On the contrary, AWS give you free tier access for a whole year, no question asked.

IMHO, don't waste time on Rackspace.

Our intent with the onboarding call is to personalize the new customer experience by getting to know more about your business or project so that we can then link you to the right resources. It sounds like we fell short of this goal when you attempted to start up your account, and for that I apologize. If you'd like me to look in to this or if there's anything else I can do to help please feel free to email me: shaggy@rackspace.com

I signed up with Rackspace a while back to host a new site I was putting together. I found the "onboarding" process so creepy and off-putting that, even though they accepted me, I went with Linode instead. Like, if that kind of weird bureaucracy was what I had to look forward to when I needed support, no thanks.

Also, their sorta-cloud-sorta-VPS setup for Rackspace Cloud seemed awkward to me. It made the control panels more confusing than they needed to be.

I've been using rackspace for a year now and have had a great run of it. I did get a call early on, but I did not register as creepy. The service has been great, except for one ubuntu kernel bug caused by me using an old image to build some servers on their new openstack systems. That was confusing.

I really like openstack. As a python hacker, it's the bee's knees.

Thanks for the kind words. We were able to get everything sorted with the kernel bug? Please let me know if I can help with this or anything else. shaggy@rackspace.com

We've had an absolutely horrible experience with Rackspace (managed, managed cloud, and unmanaged cloud). I think Rackspace has seen their day come and go (used to be a very loyal customer) and are really struggling. Their tech is old and outdated, they're awash in duplicate controls panels, their billing isn't unified, and their UK presence is completely out of control.

We're moving away as quickly as possible to Linode and AWS.

I work at Rackspace, and I'm really sorry to hear about this experience. We are working very hard to address the control panel inconveniences that you've mentioned and we would be extremely grateful if you could take the time to provide us with some feedback on how we could improve. You can reach me directly at shaggy@rackspace.com. Thanks.

Hey there - thanks for the response, but I've already wasted at least 15-20 hours over the last year communicating with Rackspace techs, management, and senior management (so I'm told). If you truly believe you can actually do something to fix all the problems, let me know.

Like I said, Rackspace's model of hiring great people and giving premium service worked great in the old days pre-cloud, but now the people are poor quality as the company has grown, the underlying tech is horrible, and the billing and other services so bad that you can't justify the premium prices anymore.

Rackspace servers and service (in all forms) are considered harmful. Just go with AWS or Linode.

its because rackspace is plain terrible. We had a VPS go down - and literally no one in their support team even going all the way up could explain why. Finally one of our own devs figured out that it was an issue with the VM. They talk a lot about their "fanatical" support - but thats essentialyl a whole lot of marketing hot air - support is average at best - and even on the managed levels where you pay 100 $ per month extra - there's no real managed service provided that is worth that much. I'd strongly suggest staying away!

Rackspace Cloud is the next poorest performing and most expensive VPS next to AWS EC2. And even though Rackspace calls its VPS cloud it isn't cloud at all.

But Unlike AWS where you get all the other AWS features and services via API and a half decent price if you play their reserve pricing and bid game. Rackspace has NONE.

I think one reason for that is because it was originally Slicehost before Rackspace bought them and a lot of people (me included) thought it went to shit after the buyout. Fortunately, in my case at least, the excellent Linode was there to pick up the pieces.