I will pass this on to the team; I concur that developer/testing signup and on-boarding presents a barrier to entry for developers to try things out and get started. In order to truly support developers the process must present a minimal amount of friction.
Providing good support (rather then barrier) would definitely help Rackspace to boost its market share. People in the past use Linode mainly because of their great support; on the other hand, AWS is basically no support (unless you pay them or just forum), and not to mention Google...so this is the sweet spot for you guys..
Just a note: The reason for the verification process that customers must go through in order to receive an account is in place to prevent spammers, misuse and AUP violations.
The current signup process for developers remains suboptimal, and a number of teams are working on this, but I thought I would quickly followup. If you still want to try out Rackspace's Cloud, I can connect you with the people needed to help debug why the verification service failed - if it failed for you, it can fail for others in the same way, and is therefore a bug.
Thanks, I don't need a rackspace account ATM, but if want it in the future, I hope the the onbroading process is eliminated completely.
I understand prevent spammers or misuse is hard, but other providers I have used like Slicehost (acquired by RS), Linode, AWS, DigitalOcean...and more) don't have any issue preventing people from signing up. (AWS even give people 1yr free tier usage)
