I've been a Rackspace customer for many years, and very very nearly left a couple of weeks ago. A program like this one might have been a huge help. Here's what happened.
My startup started getting real traction and doing a lot of business. As my user count grew, I started to see slow response times on my server. I checked out the configuration and everything looked ok to me-- but even during times of super slow response, the server was showing vmstats that looked 99% idle. So I figured this is either a network problem, or something else beyond my control, or a configuration problem that is beyond my talent to identify.
My customer base was exploding, and my infrastructure was failing. In that moment, I would have done just about ANYTHING to solve the problem. I filed a support ticket, but I didn't expect that'd help, and it didn't. I started looking around rackspace to try to figure out if I could upgrade to a dedicated server. It's not really clear to me from looking at Rackspace's web page hard for 20 minutes whether they even offer dedicated servers. If you search google for "Rackspace Dedicated Server" you get what to me is a confusing mixed message, and no clear path for getting a dedicated server. It's not clear to me if that page is comparing how Managed hosting is better than dedicated servers, or if managed hosting is the only way you offer dedicated servers, or if getting the biggest server IS the way you offer dedicated servers.
I damn near just took a shot in the dark and migrated my whole service to another provider in a desparate attempt to see if things got better. For all I knew, it was a misbehaving tenant colocated on my machine. That happened before though, and you guys identified it and solved it in hours.
In the end, I solved the problem for myself by pounding my head against it for 24 hours straight and found a configuration problem in Apache. But having an expert there to help me with this-- I would have paid any amount of money. I still would love to know I'm not going it alone in case I get DOS'd or something. But I'm not even sure who to talk to to build a relationship.
I've read the official announcement a few times now, and near as I can gather, Rackspace is not offering the kind of support I'm looking for. That support announcement appears to be helping me to fanatically use the Rackspace API's, rather than really partnering with me to use their infrastructure to do my work.
I guess what I'm looking for is just general consulting, with people who are smart and know what they're doing. Maybe what I'm looking for is comrades, fellow hackers, or a consulting service. I live in the Bay Area, so you'd think I'd be neighbors with these people.
Any of you out there: if you know of IRC channels, forums, or anything like that where people help each other with this sort of thing, let me know, I want to be part of it. I could totally help people with the kinds of problems I've been through. My wife suggested I talk to HN about the problem I was having, and I had to explain to her that this isn't that kind of community-- we talk about articles and issues, not specific problems usually. If any of you know about a community or consulting service like that or have ideas and suggestions, I'd love to hear about it.
Join #rackspace in irc.freenode.net -- we'll help out as best we can with general infrastructure problems as well as using our APIs. We just like having nice chat about anything.
If you're willing to be relatively public with the problem you're having, you might get some help from a StackExchange site, probably ServerFault in this case.
My startup started getting real traction and doing a lot of business. As my user count grew, I started to see slow response times on my server. I checked out the configuration and everything looked ok to me-- but even during times of super slow response, the server was showing vmstats that looked 99% idle. So I figured this is either a network problem, or something else beyond my control, or a configuration problem that is beyond my talent to identify.
My customer base was exploding, and my infrastructure was failing. In that moment, I would have done just about ANYTHING to solve the problem. I filed a support ticket, but I didn't expect that'd help, and it didn't. I started looking around rackspace to try to figure out if I could upgrade to a dedicated server. It's not really clear to me from looking at Rackspace's web page hard for 20 minutes whether they even offer dedicated servers. If you search google for "Rackspace Dedicated Server" you get what to me is a confusing mixed message, and no clear path for getting a dedicated server. It's not clear to me if that page is comparing how Managed hosting is better than dedicated servers, or if managed hosting is the only way you offer dedicated servers, or if getting the biggest server IS the way you offer dedicated servers.
I damn near just took a shot in the dark and migrated my whole service to another provider in a desparate attempt to see if things got better. For all I knew, it was a misbehaving tenant colocated on my machine. That happened before though, and you guys identified it and solved it in hours.
In the end, I solved the problem for myself by pounding my head against it for 24 hours straight and found a configuration problem in Apache. But having an expert there to help me with this-- I would have paid any amount of money. I still would love to know I'm not going it alone in case I get DOS'd or something. But I'm not even sure who to talk to to build a relationship.