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Currently, to delete a cloud server, you're required to call support. The option to delete servers via the API and interface have been removed. On more than one occasion I've been pitched by the "support engineer" to sign up for something akin to reserved instance pricing.

They claim it's a security measure.

I've never had an issue with service or availability. But, the price per performance on the VM instances is so much better elsewhere.

Was working to migrate to DO, but now I'm fast tracking that process.

> Currently, to delete a cloud server, you're required to call support.

This is insanity to me. I'd leave a VPS/cloud provider so fast if they started this. Even back in the day I always had the option to delete a Rackspace Cloud instance.

Wow. Just wow.

Huh, when did this happen? I deleted cloud servers via the GUI a few months ago as we are migrating stuff to AWS, but I still have some clients on Rackspace.

Finance department meeting:

MBA1: So we've figured out that we make a lot of money from people just being too lazy to delete a server.

CFO: Great, how do we make it even harder to delete a server?

MBA2: We could remove the delete button.....

MBA1: I don't think that's a very good idea

CFO: Then how will they delete servers?

MBA2: Fax us!

CFO: Brilliant, I'll tell an engineer to develop the web code.

How often do you think this type conversation happens?

I worked in a industry comparable to RS and we pretty much used same tactics but the call came from the CTO.

Often. I heard something similar in an ecommerce/digital subscription context.

Rackspace has been around forever but they are a bunch of children working out of an abandoned mall like its Day of the Dead (which they've decorated like a discount Facebook HQ). They hire a few well known OpenSource people but its clown-town the rest of the way down. This is mostly because they are stingy and risk averse. Exhibit A: Who headquarters in San Antonio? Maybe once IBM or HP hit their heads a few more times one of them will buy up Rackspace and be done with it.

I think OP meant technological and process maturity, not age.

I worked for a Rackspace competitor in the mid 2000's and can confirm that every business decision in that space is driven by short-term growth and revenue. When I worked there, the pay was terrible (although I didn't know it at the time) and the "servers" were literally rows upon rows of cheap tower PCs shoved into wire shelving. The owner of the company made millions but never invested it back into the company beyond whatever was required for horizontal expansion. (He preferred to spend it on exotic cars and vacation homes.)

There is close to zero long-term thinking in this space and as a result, a decade or two later, cloud providers are eating these guys alive.

Oh yes, definitely was not trying to argue they were mature because of their age but rather that they weren't in spite of it. Of course that is a fallacy of progress, but you get the idea.

Employee in the same space you are referring to, though bare-metal. The wreckage owners can make by thinking of the short-term gains is baffling. We are so behind the curve that we'll never make up for it.

Worked for them in the Herndon DC. Forget the name of their lovecraftian ticketing/control interface (which was always breaking) but it was hands down the worst interface I've ever worked with. Their remote SA team was not very good either. The supply/parts folks serving DC techs earned bonuses on having bad parts recycled into production and the parts delivery was not managed properly. One xmas I saw the same motherboard 5 times after returning it as defective each time. I resigned and was then fired. Only place that ever happened. Was so happy to leave I didn't care but it has come back to haunt me once or twice.

The 4 letter word you are looking for is “core”

You quit and then you were fired? How did they manage to do that - Virginia is a right to work state, you can quit any time. They can't fire you for.... quitting first?

Eh - this has happened to me. Literally word-for-word: "You can't quit! You're fired!"

I know it seems like it could be right out of a Simpsons episode or w/e but managers can have some pretty backwards egos. The same manager tried telling my colleagues that I had been fired and like 2-3 people were like, "Nope - actually he quit. Thanks for screwing us out of 2 weeks of project hand-off..."

Careful with DigitalOcean, though. I had my entire account frozen (and all servers stopped) for an hour due to spinning up dedicated CPU instances to do some video transcoding.

Fortunately for us, we don't have anything mission-critical on DigitalOcean. Running a similar load on Vultr (high frequency CPU nodes) simply got us a polite email asking us to switch to dedicated nodes, which we happily did.

Appreciate this anecdote. I tested their new PaaS recently and found the build times to be ungodly slow, much more so than Heroku.

Did I understand this right, that they stopped your servers because you spun up some dedicated CPU instances? Isn't that what you're supposed to do?

I used Rackspace from 2012-2017 ish and it went noticeably downhill during that time. I had Linode servers at the same time and they had better uptime and better support for a fraction of the price, so that’s where I moved everything. No regrets.

Similar. used to be happy RS customer 6 years ago, then everything just got more complicated and less stable. Now they are public should have the cash to avoid any major issues like this. Just no reason to use them with G Cloud, AWS, Digital Ocean (happy customer with them too plus AWS).

Rackspace is very mature. However in their cloud offerings I'm not experienced or so sure.

This is kinda surprising this ever happened, no cloud company allows this with nuremous safe guards in place. This is very embarrassing for RS.

> Rackspace is very mature

Nahhh - it went public and everything is a race to the "bottom line" while exec/investors skim money off of the company vs. re-invest in an ever-changing market. Their stagnation has effectively put them back in the crib maturity wise.

It's not surprising when a company goes public and everything becomes about the almighty dollar first, and any sort of technical/support excellence second. Seen it happen time and time again in tech...

Vendor problems... amirite?

(I'm the OP)

We didn't have anything important there, migrated to GCP a while ago.

> If you find yourself on Rackspace hosting I would absolutely migrate to something more mature.

Rackspace has actually been around longer than DigitalOcean. I'm not arguing that they're better or worse though because I haven't used either in years.

Maturity has nothing to do with age, even 50 year olds can be imature.

You can't be a child forever, but you can always be childish.

I wouldn't say maturity has nothing to do with age, but point taken.

There are more components to maturity than age.

Yes - I'm aware. The age of a product does not correlate to the maturity of the product.

Thanks for the "correction"