Rackspace Reviews

Advantages

Rackspace was founded back in 1996 and is currently the biggest cloud technology provider in the world! Rackspace serves a large customer base, which is comprised of thousands of both large corporations and small businesses. Since its inception in this industry, the company has specialized in the provision of high performance cloud servers with a primary focus on public cloud hosting, managed hosting and private cloud hosting.

Rackspace website hosting plans are a perfect choice for e- commerce, corporate and simple websites. Other solutions made available by the company include business app hosting, custom app hosting and other hosting such as cloud media hosting and mobile stacks. They also offer email archiving and migration.

Rackspace’s best selling point is their promise of a 100% network uptime guarantee. Another key element of their services is excellent customer support, which is made possible by their 2,000 member workforce, comprised of very knowledgeable and experienced staff. In addition to this, Rackspace.com is best known for providing customers with faster than average response times.

Highlights: Excellent customer support and commitment to providing environmentally friendly web hosting make their offerings very appealing.
Rackspace Hosting Plans and Features
Options for Rackspace cloud hosting plans include three managed cloud hosting packages that afford users the benefit of working with a provider that will take care of practically every aspect of cloud hosting. From workload architecture, construction and operation, the Rackspace managed cloud hosting plans take care of it all.

• The company’s Managed Infrastructure service level plan guarantees that customers will have access to Rackspace architecture and security guidance, assistance with code development and 24/7 customer support from cloud engineers.
• The Managed Operations (SysOps) plan includes all features of a Managed Infrastructure plan, with the additional benefit of assistance with the day-to-day operations of cloud hosting. This could include the maintenance and patching of an operating system, infrastructure monitoring and application maintenance.
• With the Managed Operations (DevOps Automation) plan, Rackspace will design a user’s cloud infrastructure as code and manage automatic configurations; Rackspace experts can further collaborate with a user to ensure faster deployments.

Rackspace also specializes in eCommerce hosting that uses cloud technology. Customers of the Rackspace eCommerce plan benefit from the provider’s agreement to design and develop a user’s online store on Magento or Oracle with long-term end-to-end support. Rackspace also goes to lengths to ensure that each online store they create specifically caters to a user’s individual needs and preferences, such as PCI compliance standards, security needs, design preferences and more. In fact, Rackspace is currently the number one provider of Magento hosting in the world.

For those with websites that heavily depend on website content management systems, Rackspace also offers web content management platform hosting that provides flexible, real-time cloud scalability and performance monitoring that’s proactive. The company focuses on managing Adobe Experience Manager environments, as well as Sitecore Customer Engagement platforms.

Rackspace’s Cloud Sites hosting plan for professional web hosting with high volumes of traffic offers a 99.99% uptime with highly scalable features that will automatically adjust when traffic spikes or dips, along with full system management. Rackspace will manage version control, patching operating systems, server administration and more under a Cloud Sites hosting plan. This plan also includes unlimited domains and 50GB of storage, 500GB of bandwidth, and 10,000 compute cycles each month, and supports multiple platforms on the same domain, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP, or .NET.

In need of dedicated hosting for a more complex website? Rackspace features five different dedicated hosting plans that can run on CentOS, Windows Server or RedHat Linux operating systems. All dedicated hosting plans are managed by Rackspace; specialists will help users choose the right type of server, storage resources and more for their specific site. Users can select plans with up to 32 processor cores, 1TB of RAM and options for SATA, SAS, eMLC, SLC, SSDs and PCle local storage.
Rackspace Data Center Locations and Acceleration
Rackspace operates data centers in Chicago, Dallas, London, Northern Virginia, Hong Kong, and Sydney. These data centers are operates on a high-performance bandwidth (which helps improve speed) from 9 different network providers that offer enterprise-class routing. In addition to its 6 international data center locations, Rackspace also has 219 CDN locations on 6 different continents, to improve uptimes for customers with sites that are accessed by visitors from various international locations.
Rackspace Security
Rackspace hosting packages are equipped with high level security measures to ward off both malicious threats and ensure consistent uptimes in the case of power outages or server failures at the company’s data centers. Rackspace offers the high-performing Cisco®ASA and Imperva® web application firewalls, along with a log management and intrusion detection system that will alert users when threats have been detected. Additional security measures include options for:

• SSL certificates
• DDoS Mitigation
• Anti-virus protection

Rackspace maintains its own internal security division, Rackspace Global Security Services, to oversee all of its security and compliance initiatives. Rackspace also complies with best practices listed in the ISO 27002 manual, which features globally-recognized security standards. If you’re looking for a more secure hosting provider, you probably won’t be able to find one that exceeds what Rackspace can offer.
Rackspace Email
Rackspace specializes in business email hosting, and offers daily management of all of its email platforms. Customers can take advantage of the Rackspace Hosted Exchange email option, which provides 100GB mailboxes and 50MB of email attachments for Microsoft Exchange email accounts. The standard Rackspace email option (used by 3 million people around the world), provides managed email hosting for professional, business-class email with guaranteed uptimes and round-the-clock technical support. Customers can login to their Rackspace email account from their mobile phones, the Rackspace Webmail application, or even Outlook. Rackspace also provides an email archiving service that stores and organizes all email with secure SSL encryption, and allows customers and their employees to conduct searches and audits of archived emails quickly and conveniently.
Is Rackspace Good?
Rackspace has been a highly-recommended hosting provider for over a decade; its wide international customer base and substantial annual growth is telling of the company’s ability to provide consistent quality service that offers customers cutting-edge hosting solutions. The Rackspace Fanatical Support customer service division has also been highly praised for round-the-clock access to a legion of highly trained professionals. Rackspace is undoubtedly a great choice for those corporations and businesses in need of work solutions in cloud environments or on dedicated servers, but the company can also accommodate those with more minimal needs as well.