I am considering switching from 2 colo servers to 2 or 3 RackShack servers. I think this poll could help others in my situation.
If you host client sites on an RS server/servers and you charge for it (if you don't charge you should not join this poll) do you feel the network uptime, server reliability, support response times and policies are good enough for this type of business.

I just voted and didn't plan on writing an actual response, but I thought you would care to hear about thier support. I just put in a ticket to have reverse DNS entries made for my IP's and it was completed in less then 3 minutes...not 3 hours...3 minutes! That's crazy. I think you will find RS to be a great place to run your business.

I've been with them over a year and I'm happy. I swapped from another datacenter that basically lied to me. One thing about RS is that everything is open and honest - what other datacenter would have an OPEN forum. You won't find many gripes and most are from people who did the wrong thing. RS isn't perfect - they do fall down sometimes, but compared to others, well they do a good job. I'm not even talking price.

Make sure you can manage your own servers though - or you will have a steep learning curve.

It's good to hear, I had a feeling this would go in favor of RackShack. I thought the poll would help others too since sometimes you have to ask a satisfied customer to respond. The negatives always show up with or without an invitation.

A side note: Maybe it was obvious to everyone except me, but, I was under the impression everyone was running their own DNS servers. That's another plus for some that don't want to or don't know how to manage DNS.
thx

Actually I do run my own DNS servers, but RS owns the IP, so they have to update the reverse PTRs

Just wanted to add my $.02 worth here as a host. I've never (to my knowledge) had any downtime because of Rackshack. Any down time I have had has been due to my own foolishness or some software upgrade gone wrong. As far as I know, Rackshack's network has been 100% for me since december of last year.

That speaks for itself, but in addition to that I am also recieving better and faster support times as HeadSurefer continues to try to up the quality of the support service.

Hope that helps,

Jon

I totally agree. Freddo's right on the money!

diddo, 100% uptime on RS side, 99.9% on my side

actually i have had three 5 minute outages as routing tables changed, so to be accurate RS's uptime for me has been 99.997%

Been here for 1.5 years, 5 servers at the moment, and love it!

I had some problems with my first box, a Duron, so I recommend you go with P4 or better. I have P3 1.7ghz and P4 2ghz boxes, and they've all been rock solid.

RS support has been great. For an unmanaged service, they definitely go above and beyond.

When RS had delays rolling out Windows, and I really needed a Windows server, I tried Superb Servers, what a mistake! It was absolutely abysmal dealing with them. I now have a Windows 2003 STD server here at RS, and it is great! I've learned my lesson.

I appreciate everyones comments and hope this helps others that were sitting on the fence.

I've only had a Linux server here a little over 9 months but have to say RS support is outstanding.

The only downtime I've had during the past 9 months is do to software failure.

NO network downtime.

During those same 9 months my only Windows managed server, at another data center, has been down 5 times for a total of about 7 hours total downtime .

Is Rackshack the best..........Um, if you have to ask, you'll never know.............

I've been with RS since the first Linux boxes became available in December 2001. Customer service and network stability has been fantastic.

I would like to see RS offer RAID configurations, however. It really is only a matter of time before a drive fails. Even with timely backups, I'd suffer several hours of downtime.

That's a good point for web hosting. I have never run a web server that didn't have mirrored drives. One more thing that was holding me back was single Nics. We always ran private IPs on 2nd Nics and backed up between servers. I thought that was a concern having bandwidth measured at the port but when you think the average Colo NOC is 30-50GB base transfer per month it kind of becomes a non-issue if you only backup changed files. I noticed superb.net's colo bandwirdth fees are 50GB = $300 and each additional 50GB is $135. Ouch!
That brings up another issue, never being one to buy the cheapest, if RS is as good as this poll shows many may be avoiding it because they figure you can't get a Mercedes at Kia prices.

They have some Dual XEON Raid 5 configurations. Check the server page.

I've had plenty of hosts and ran my own web server farm several times (at one time had 25 servers), while I never had major problems, I definately didn't have the uptime I have with rackshack. In the last year I've had 15 minutes of downtime, (a router went berzerk on my segment). But they where on top of it, I got a reply back to my help ticket in minutes. Reboot requests are fast as lightening.

Like I said, I've been with plenty, even some of the ones that have been around for ever and sucked a bunch of others up (interland), and in short, their support sucks, their is always downtime every month, and there's not many answers.

If your that worried about raid, why not get a second server on the same segment and back up to that, I don't think you'll have as much downtime as you think you will, but if you do, just bind the ip and wham, your sites are back up!!

Well I've been with RS for over 2 years, and only had 1 horror story so far.

My single server (old duron plesk 2.5 box) had three major attacks in three days the final attack was a security breach that turned into a hacker attacking another server company in canada from my box. RS didnt throw the book at us which was a good thing, and we got the data transferred to another server and the rebuilt. The whole process did take more time than it should have but the guys did do the biz for us considering the pice we pay.

We've since reinvested a lot more in RS and expanded our network to hopefully become more secure.

total down time was 36 hours, but that was as bad as it could possbily get. RS support did feck up a bit and the down time could have been 12 hrs if the rebuild teams would have read me TT's and the server had been rebuilt properly.

Before the attacks the server had been operational without reboot for 11 months, so you cant really fault them for up time. I was just unlucky with the rebuild and the shift changes that I had with time differece etc...


boomer.