Rackspace: meh. not that fanatical.

I had such high hopes for Rackspace.  I’ve been hearing so many great things, I couldn’t help but get my hopes up.  My experience with Rackspace was anything but good, however.

It’s not like my request was complicated.  I wanted about 10 servers in managed colocation on a private switch behind a pfsense firewall.  Managed colocation means that I’ll do all the work of configuring them.  All Rackspace has to do is stick some servers in a rack and connect them with cables.  This is part of their advertised service offering.

Talking to the Rackspace sales team was an ordeal.  The problem wasn’t that I had to go through four tiers of sales people – though I did – or that they didn’t get back to me when they said they would – though they didn’t.  The biggest problem I had is that every time I’d advance through another tier of sales people, they would contradict the previous tier.  Every time I talked to someone new they would take something off the table until, in the end, we arrived at a solution that didn’t resemble what I wanted in the first place.

The last straw was when the latest salesperson told me that he just found out about a new rule that all managed colocation customers are required to rent a Cisco ASA firewall.  My BSD firewalls aren’t good enough.  This seems especially confusing since (presumably) I wouldn’t have to administer a Cisco firewall if I were to just rent 10 dedicated servers from them.

Regardless, for $600 per month per server I should be able to configure them in whatever way I want.  That’s way too steep a price to put up with all this run around.

I shall make a point of never doing business with a company who doesn’t list their prices on their website.