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Comment by seats | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with you. It's just that even if the Rackspace control panel was perfect today that wouldn't fix the core issue.

The core issue is that you're going to have your needs met if you are on the critical path, especially for a company growing at such a fast pace that has to deal with the reality of making choices on where to spend scarce resources.

By your own logic, having more people be squeaky wheels for the Rackspace control panel should be a good thing. It will be even more pressure for that to be addressed.

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My point is that you might be measuring customer needs/migration path in a way differently than customers do (if you repeatedly see them move away to a 3rd party, especially one particular 3rd party).

A common theme in this thread is that people inside Rackspace see Rackspace Cloud + Slicehost as very similar, because 1) they have a common corp ownership 2) they have an increasingly common (but hidden-to-users) back-end 3) they have common staff in some cases.

But the customers in this thread see Linode + Slicehost as much more similar because 1) their control panels are a bit more similar 2) they share DNS flexibility + other featuers 3) Price (Linode moving in more attractive direction for some use-cases).

Neither interpretation is necessarily right, but in this era it's definitely time to rethink what customer needs are (if you're outlining a migration path). I don't think RS is wrong for discontinuing Slicehost (I'd definitely wanna EOL older products), I just think they're wrong in how they parse features, experiences, and what user needs are.

I see since I posted earlier that user:polvi (hiya!) says the Cloudkick posse is working on the control panel for RSC. I've no doubt that all providers will greatly up their UX game (something something Dave McClure design dogma :D).

It just feels disingenuous for RS peeps to say over and over "Slicehost services are not dying, it's just the brand that's going away" when real features and real UX are going away, at least for a window of time. And it's totally normal for users to go where those features and UX can be found, even if it's a separate company. To users, that feels easier.

We are in agreement for sure.

UX at rackspace now is ick at best, but since the Polvi virus is currently spreading in the place, I'd bet on significant improvement.

I just see that there are two independent issues. One is that Rackspace UX needs help, the other is that there are dual/competing brands, one of which is feature stranded. Clearly they are related when you consider collapsing the brand into one, but I still think it's worth thinking about them in terms of two distinct issues.

For what its worth, I stopped using Rackspace (specifically Rackspacecloud) for 2 reasons:

1. The control panel experience was incredibly bad. Incredibly. Large chunk of features simply didn't work and consistently gave errors (I opened numerous tickets, some were claimed to be fixed but later the errors came back). It's unacceptably slow, to the order of 2-5 seconds of loading anything. And the overall flow and experience is just bad (it took far too many clicks to do something like change a DNS entry).

For a while my startup persisted with using Rackspace just because we already had some infrastructure on it. Once an opportunity to move off came along, I jumped on it (it's now hosted on DotCloud).

2. I had some bizarre experience with getting questioned on the phone while signing up for a new account (setting up a personal account to toy around with vs my other business account). I was questioned about all sorts of things like what I will be using it for, what I'm working on, various private details that I was unwilling to give out. As long as I'm not doing anything illegal or against your ToS, it's none of Rackspace's business what I'm going to run on my VPS.

Now I use Linode for all my personal VPS needs and I love it. The control panel is super snappy, the user experience is simple and efficient, and they don't ask me questions they shouldn't be asking. Also when I report a problem, they actually fix it and are very open and transparent about everything.

Since then, I've recommended Linode to at least a dozen people specifically against Rackspace. Yes, I may be a squeaky wheel, but I believe fixing the control panel (and customer privacy policies) should be Rackspace's #1 priority, especially given all the other feedback you're getting inline with this. Each person who posted here could represent a dozen customers down the line.

Have you tried the cloudkick control panel?

I haven't. I abandoned the Rackspace ship before the acquisition, in Fall 2010.

Actually the acquisition was in Fall 2008. You can also try out the cloudkick CP for linode and AWS as well, from their CP you can use all 3 providers.

Ah, my bad (quick crunchbasing fail).

What's the draw for using CP on Linode? I'm completely happy with the Linode control panel experience.

AWS I don't have to worry about because I use DotCloud which handles all my network configuration and instance maintenance.

Prior to CK's acquisition by Rackspace, I'd say the main selling point is a common control panel experience for cross provider stuff. They were adding on monitoring as a pay service top as well.

I was suggesting it initially as a way to not suffer any pain with the existing Rackspace Cloud CP.

> By your own logic, having more people be squeaky wheels for the Rackspace control panel should be a good thing. It will be even more pressure for that to be addressed.

or, people will just leave because they don't want to deal with having to downgrade to a smaller featureset and worse CP at a higher cost, and then have to wait around for it to perhaps get better. i'm already preparing my slices for migration to linode. sorry. been with slicehost for years and was perfectly happy up until this.

Make sure you do the math on the options, last time I checked Cloud Servers will be cheaper for the vast majority of use cases, by a fairly real margin.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone at Rackspace who will tell you their existing CP is great. Definitely not a matter of if, but when on the improvement there.

a bit cheaper on average when converting slicehost to rackspace, but not universally so. $20/mo slice, for example, converts to somewhere between $0 ($11 if you estimate 100% uptime) and $38 on the rackspace plan. its kind of dependent upon what you're doing and still a roll of the dice.

not cheaper at all when converting slicehost to linode or some of the other competitors.

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