Rackspace MAJOR outage and terrible communications

I had an ordeal involving Rackspace a while back. They switched their Cloud Files (S3-like) service to having a $5 minimum per month with no warning, so my bills shot up from 86 cents. No big deal other than the lack of communication, I moved everything off and deleted all my files.

A month later there was another $5 charge so I opened a ticket. Over the course of a year and about 12 different tickets they first said access logs were still there, so I kept getting charged. Then they deleted those and they came back… and then came back again… and again.

I finally got the files actually gone and still got charged $5. Finally they admit that I needed to have them deactivate the account, so I did.

Six or so months later, the $5 charges were back, so another round of support tickets ensued. Even though admitting that it was a billing error, they insisted that I had to pay the outstanding invoices before they could credit and refund them. Finally after demanding that they escalate it, the credit was issued anyway, but it continued to happen for several months in a row.

The same thing happened for several months in a row before I finally got them to escalate again and got the account closed… only to get another bill the next month.

Rackspace was amazing back in the day, but I honestly have no idea how they fell this far. Never, ever again.