Rackspace Managed Hosting vs. WP Engine

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.

New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it.

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

• I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
• The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
• They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.

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

• The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like.
• The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique.
• Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets.
• Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990?

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

I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.

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

It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.

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

For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon

Incentivized

• 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

• Positive: We've been able to scale up more easily as adding new sites has been easier.
• Positive: The load speed improvements we saw were immediate and have not let up.
• Negative: Adding advanced security and other tools to a multiple sites is expensive.

Incentivized