IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

IBM Cloud Bare Metal servers are best suited if you are looking for an alternative for adding computing resources to your organization's IT domain. The costs of owning and maintaining a physical resource in the organization are far more than renting computing resources on the cloud. The bare-metal servers allow you to utilize the entire server for your organization's requirements.

I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.

• Performance - the servers perform really well, even under stress. We have some long build processes running concurrently, and the server [can] serve other applications without any problems.
• Secure - for the most part, the servers are very secure and IBM provides many tools to help [make] sure the servers stay that way.
• Highly Available - while we have experienced various downtimes and outages with other IBM Cloud offerings, so far, we have not experienced any with [IBM Cloud] Bare Metal Servers.

Incentivized

• Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
• Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.

Incentivized

• Firmware upgrades are not always easy to perform and can be required at unusual time intervals at different datacenters.
• No networking monitoring is available.
• Changes on the IBM side can cause an outage, so you MUST plan for redundancy when building out.

Incentivized

• Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
• The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
• The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
• There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.

Incentivized

Due to cloud computing taking over the market, I have moved to cloud computing. It is so much easier upgrading or downsizing a virtual server on the cloud vs bare metal. I find it way more convenient on cloud computing. The provisioning takes way too long for bare metal servers.

Incentivized

If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!

Incentivized

The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability

Incentivized

Great responsiveness and detailed know-how from the team. Self Explanatory and good resources on the Web to resolve issues. Good communication on issues via email. Good response times on issues which arise and where we have received support from the IBM support team. We believe that IBM is a great Partner to base our IT applications and we believe that a critical infrastructure like a cloud backend will be well served if we continue to base it on IBM.

Incentivized

In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!

Incentivized

The implementation of this software took place as we planned. The performance time taken for full functionality was very reliable with positive results. The customer support team was the best team I have ever met in my career experience. They are always with timely responses when reached to offer any help.

Incentivized

Configured file systems on bare metal servers and was able to increase the size whenever required. Can limit the costs initially to understand the application demand and need. Later, have the flexibility to increase the size of the file system as the application grows bigger and bigger without any hassle.

Incentivized

Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support. We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers. We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider. Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available). We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system. Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.

Incentivized

• [I feel] IBM caused significant damages to their acknowledged "gross negligence." [...] [In my opinion,] holding customers/data hostage to limit gross negligence is an extremely poor practice.
• [With my experiences,] our investment was a tremendous loss in time & resources. Their lack of support, [in my opinion,] has caused us to pivot our entire business model and revenue stream. Our product re-launch has been setback by ~18 months due to damages caused by [in my experience, to be] IBM's gross negligence.

• We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
• We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
• A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.

Incentivized