Comments on: An Open Letter to Rackspace Cloud Hosting

By: Ttx1

Ttx1 — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:05:00 +0000

Sir I am sorry but get out of the cloud a doctor put peoples files in the cloud and they all lost their info with in 3 to 10 days so get out of the cloud it is very bad

By: Edward Rendini

Edward Rendini — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:50:00 +0000

So you’re on top of your shit and others aren’t. Get used to it. Stars are stars. There’s only a few of them in the grand scheme of things. Everyone else is faking.

By: Remembering

Remembering — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:22:00 +0000

Off subject a bit, but Rackspace centric … I’m just so sad. I too have lauded Rackspace, and have paid more for the support I get. However, a month ago, I noticed our account at a ridiculously high dollar amount. I emailed my account person and said I thought something was wrong. We never carry a balance over $500 … we were more than double that. A reply came, with a copy to someone in accounting, asking them to provide backup so I could audit the fees. I did, and to my surprise, found no errors in Rackspace’s statements. I wrote back and asked for two things to happen, a. that my server be cut once I migrated to a cheaper solution, also at Rackspace, and b. that we begin making payments to pay down this balance, starting with a payment before the end of 2010.

Yesterday, we were suspended for non payment, and the only way to get this resolved was to pay the entire balance or $900. I am a very small business, with only myself and a part time person. This outage and resulting firestorm of communication has left me bitter and angry.

I brought the account to the attention of the accounting department, not to be punished, but to protect my relationship with them. And, with my clients. However, some of my sites are still dark and Rackspace has refused to reverse the decision to require the full balance before we go live.

I’m so angry. Thank you for the post, and for the warning. I operate several WP installations for clients and our ‘cheaper solution’ is a cloud.

Cole
Remembering.com (still down)

By: snipe

snipe — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:34:00 +0000

Hah – thanks – that design is 8 years old. I should probably fix that.

You can reach them, sure – but WordPress is actually pretty stable these days. Hacks are generally a result of an older install that never got updated, or a crappy plugin. It’s nice that I can call them for help, but it would be better if I didn’t have to in the first place. That’s my point.

Some of the things I’ve been asking for from RS are things I’ve been asking for for two years. And these are reasonable things that other grid/cloud hosting companies offer.

They do have an amazing infrastructure, and they’ve gotten a LOT better over the past year. MySQL is way more scalable now than I was, and they handle some logging stuff a lot better than they did. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be frustrated that it’s still not where it should be. (Also, this article was written almost a year ago. They fixed a lot since then.)

By: Webmaster

Webmaster — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 21:37:00 +0000

How about that…

It looks prettier than mine also; grats =D

Yeah the shared environment makes it a pain in the ass to do a number of things; but real hosting breaks the average bank. I just wouldn’t rely on wordpress for much of anything.

And you’re right; I haven’t done much forensic work but I know the RackSpace Cloud. It’s an amazing infrastructure, and they are constantly seeking to improve it. And they’re the only dudes I can ever get on the phone – so even if you’ve got something to bitch about atleast you can reach them.

By: snipe

snipe — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:21:00 +0000

There are ways to secure it – but if you think there were not legitimate factors in the hosting environment that made it harder to track down the vector, you’ve never done any hack forensic work. They have changed a few of those things over the past several month, making it a little easier. (No more load-balancer IP address for example.)

Funny about your domain name – I own vitruvianarts.com.

By: Webmaster

Webmaster — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:18:00 +0000

WordPress is shit; quit using it if you want security. You get what you pay for.

The infrastructure is solid.

By: snipe

snipe — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 02:26:00 +0000

Rackspace has gotten a lot better since that article was written. A lot. You probably get that many search results on “Rackspace wordpress hacked” because Rackspace is a much more popular host. Everyone had heard of Rackspace – the same isn’t true for page.ly, so it’s a sheer numbers game at that point. WordPress gets hacked often, most of the time due to the user not updating their install or plugins. Correlation does not imply causation. Not saying Rackspace is perfect, but I’m also not willing to move 200 websites to a company I’ve never heard of. I’ll keep an eye on them and see how it goes over the next year or two though, so thanks for the heads up

By: Imagineer

Imagineer — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Maybe its time to move on to Page.ly. as they are focused on security by hosting their site with Firehost
• Automatic WordPress Core/Plugin updates
• Backed by the Bulletproof security of Firehost.com
o Managed Redundant Firewall Protection
o Managed Redundant Web Application FireWall Protection
o Managed Redundant DoS/DDoS Mitigation
o Multi-level Intrusion Prevention and Detection
o http://www.firehost.com/why/compare

They sounds good, but I have yet to use any of their services yet. At least I don’t get any horror stories while searching “Page.ly wordpress hacked” as compared to “Rackspace cloud wordpress hacked”. This is how I found your blog.

By: Twitter Fail

Twitter Fail — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:30:01 +0000

Wow. I found this because I was researching the breach last week that caused 7 of my blogs to be hacked. I've been with them for years, and have put up with stuff like this over and over because I thought it was probably my fault and didn't look to see how many other people were affected. It's time to say goodbye to Rackspace. They just don't seem to have what it takes to manage their cloud properly.